Fundamentally, the research industry requires continuous exponential growth to accommodate everyone working there. Each PI trains 10+ grad students in their car

Fundamentally, the research industry requires continuous exponential growth to accommodate everyone working there. Each PI trains 10+ grad students in their career. Where do those students go? They all want to become PIs themselves. Otherwise why would they get a PhD? Ultimately the majority must be disappointed and leave for positions outside academia. But leaving academia is a process that takes some time. First cognitively as you give up on your dreams and decide to leave. Then as you search for a new job with no real-world experience and few or no connections. In the mean time, the pipeline between grad school and professorship gets longer and fuller. Postdocs were once extremely prestigious positions, a sort of "finishing school" for the elite. Now they're standard, and most people need to do more than 1. In practice it's a holding pattern, giving PhDs something to do while they try to struggle to the top of the heap and find an assistant professorship. And the actual experience of a postdoc! Leave all your friends and move to a new city. Work 60 hours a week for $45k a year. Have the rest of your career controlled by your PI, who you maybe met a few times before you decided to work for them, who has never had any kind of management training, and is under their own severe pressure to publish and bring in new grants. Compete against other brilliant, driven people, many of whom are abusing stimulants, and/or are immigrants with no safety net and willing to work 80+ hours. How could this system NOT create a mental health crisis?