I have to admit: in a way, I’m sad I went to school for so long. I don’t regret it exactly because getting a PhD was useful in getting a postdoctoral fellowship and then a job. But I only found that subsequent job to be useful because it allowed me to save some money so that I could later quit and do something I enjoyed more.
But I didn’t enjoy any part of my career after I got my PhD. My postdoctoral fellowship was unfulfilling and so was the job I had for five years outside of academia. Both were unfulfilling partly because they consisted of highly specialized work that I found tedious and mostly uninteresting. I can say that the only good part about my postdoctoral fellowship was that it was in Australia, which was a beautiful country full of nice birds. And the only good thing about my job was the last day because it felt great to quit. Did it ever.
Even my PhD I found to be, to a large degree, unfulfilling. It was in math, and I do enjoy math. And I enjoyed the first few years where I really had the chance to learn a lot of advanced math and spend a lot of time randomly exploring. But when it came time to get into the system of writing papers and producing original research, I stopped enjoying it. It took me about seven years to get a masters degree and PhD, and I’d say that the reason I liked it was mainly because I had enough time to explore mathematics on my own.
Back then, I had always wanted to study advanced mathematics. But I think I would have been happy studying it for 3-4 years and then going on to do something else. Or maybe studying it still on my own time and even producing my own results, as long as the process wasn’t circumscribed by the whims of the modern academic machine.
I wrote about that before, but basically, I think that the pursuit of endless generalizations and new results in math has gone past the point of diminishing returns. As a result, mathematics has become an arena that selects for rare individuals who enjoy highly abstract things useless and irrelevant to most people, and where each research area has maybe a dozen to a hundred people who really care about it. Mostly more on the dozen side.
But the point is that I think it’s rather hollow to pursue some technical pathway without end just because it’s the optimum point for modern technological society to have people who go down that path. It can be partially satisfying when going down such a path, of course. After all, when I was studying math for instance, it was nice to have some social group to interact with. We learned together and taught each other. It was a satisfying journey in many ways.
But did it really matter in the end? When I look back in life, I can see the experiences that still matter to me. They were the things I did because out of naïve curiosity and enjoyment. My own explorations into mathematics, my walks in nature, and reading books.
Of course, not all of life can be just fun. One must work for a living. But even work can at least come from a solid foundation of innate curiosity. My point is that the system so strongly pushes people around that they never have time to find this out, even if they have the aptitude to do so. There’s just too much to do to fit in, especially in one’s youth, that there’s no time for a healthy level of independent exploration.
If I did know then what I know now, what would I do differently? Many things, like everyone else. But I would definitely formulate a more solid long-term plan to do something a little different, a little more away from the mainstream. I probably would have devoted more time to creating as many passive income streams as possible, such as mathematics courses online. And I think I might have even chosen a different specialization in school like biology so I could have been paid to spend time in nature. Maybe. I’m sure I would have given more serious thought to leaving North America.
All of this borders on regret, but isn’t quite. Actually, I consider myself very lucky because I was able to just quit and do something different: wildlife photography. That doesn’t mean I consider all of it ideal, because making a living from it is still integrated within the system. But at least it gives me plenty of time to do my own thing and plenty of time away from forced discussion with people about utterly trivial matters, which is an activity that I detest.
Of course, my experiences in school shaped who I was and made me extra rebellious and averse to the ways of the system, and that’s a good thing. So if given the chance, I would be very hesitant to change anything because fate is just the way it is: sometimes it’s smooth and sometimes it’s baptism by fire. All that being said, I wish in some abstract way that I spent way less time in higher education, because I think for the most part, it’s a circuitous and idiotic route to a better tomorrow. And, as much as I enjoy mathematics and as much as I have a healthy amount of scientific curiosity, I believe strongly that I would have had a much better education just spending time in nature, meditating, reading, and pursuing my own curiosity.