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Comment by mertnesvat | Hacker News Reader

Your answer is very inspiring and also perfect example for youngsters to understand money and productivity are not the only things that matters in life.

I had a similar junction in my life and I selected money instead of pursuing family and academic life, now I'm starting to think maybe wasn't a good decision. I'm getting older (38)

Do you mind if I ask did you also quit your job to pursue Phd? Nowadays started working on my old projects, ideas and realised this is the only stuff that I'm enjoyed right now!

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The grass always seems greener on the other side. Academic careers have their own stresses and challenges with many postdocs and pre-tenure professors working slave hours at just-above-poverty wages for many years.

If you want to do academic research (and teach a lot), you are definitely young enough to get a PhD. But make sure you are switching because academia is what you love doing, not because you hate your current state (success in academia requires a major committment). My 2c.

>The grass always seems greener on the other side.

Everyone should memorize this adage. Sometimes making a change is the right decision of course. But I've also known a lot of people over the years who just got an itch to make a change because of some relatively minor gripes. And things did not work out as hoped.

Academia in particular is easy to idealize based on successful tenured professors at top tier universities who seem to have a pretty good life.

On the other hand...

Most people have a built in bias to stick with what they know rather than trying something new. We probably stay in bad situations much longer than we should. Ymmv

That's totally fair as well. Although things worked out pretty well, I have stayed at long-term jobs for longer than I probably should have.

One key is probably to really ask yourself why you want to make a change (or why you're hanging around if you don't really like the situation). If you have good answers, that's fine. If you don't...

Ultimately you have to make decisions based on incomplete information and with the knowledge that no situation is likely to be perfect.

I don't believe the grass is always greener on the other side. In fact, many people agree with me that the grass on my side is way greener.

It takes effort on my part to control envy from others. I actively suppress it.

Yes, I did. At the age of 42!

Funny you should ask. I posted about my experience in a recent thread a few weeks back.

Search for my user name here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21299546

Yes indeed, I've read with enthusiasm :)

Thanks for sharing, I want to congratulate you and your wife because I assume as we get older big changes like quitting job, moving to another country or even moving to another house is getting harder to decide. But I guess hard choices are mostly fruitful in the long run.

Ha, thanks!

Some choices are hard because of uncertainty and fear of the unknonwn. People live through terrible relationships, suffer terrible commutes, work in soul-sucking places etc and are yet unable to quit because the alterntives are less defined.

While I have enough finances to be comfortable (and reduce uncertainty), I don't know of anyone personally who has made the choices I have, even though many are vastly richer than I. They continue to grumble about expenses and commutes and health issues. Middle class people vastly overestimate how much they really need, and peg their lifestyles to that bar, often at the cost of everything dear.

I have a very simple approach. I ask "What's the worst that can happen? Will this affect me next year?". I find that once I quantify it, most fears just melt away. Say my laptop gets stolen and everything in it is irretrievable. No backup, say. What's the worst? It would be a royal pain to get back my life, but by this time next year, I'd be just fine. Moving to a different country to do a PhD? What's the worst? I'll perform badly and get chucked out, and I will return and get another job. Five years from now it would be a fine story to regale my friends with.

Sorry. I'm getting wordier as I grow older!

I really agree with your comment, but the problem with "What's the worst that can happen?" for a lot of us is that it's so easy to go down a rabbit hole and find a way that your life would end or be ruined, no matter how unlikely it is. When I'm feeling anxious, like if I'm driving, I genuinely believe that I will be hit and killed at any moment, and there's nothing I can do about it.

So the technique I use is I say to myself "It's pretty likely that I'll be 35 years old at some point, regardless of whether I try to get a post-bac or not. It'd be really nice to be a doctor by then". Substitute in whatever long-term goal you have like founding a company or running a marathon.

Nice story! I'd love to try do exactly the same, did you have to move to Cambridge for your CS PhD?

For context, I have a graduate diploma from the Judge business school, but that was a semiresidential program that allowed me to live in my country.

Yes. I moved. I wanted to. There is no substitute to meeting your friends at elevenses (tea at 11 in the morning), pubs etc. Getting the degree is just 10% of the fun.

I read and really liked your story about going to Cambridge when you first posted it. Did you find a PhD helped you find more interesting gigs?

Yes. I worked on the Bloom language at Berkeley. I am teaching now at a Uni. These wouldn't have been possible without a PhD.

> I had a similar junction in my life and I selected money instead of pursuing family and academic life, now I'm starting to think maybe wasn't a good decision. I'm getting older (38)

Wasn't a good decision despite making money or wasn't a good decision because you didn't make enough?

More specifically, I think at the end, money that I got wasn't worth not spent time with family and pursuing different life paths. My friends who were taking it slow has not much of a different life than I do now.

More deep in that topic, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has a good experiment where they research about what life worths living by asking many participants with different incomes. Result was pretty clear that after some amount of money the life standard has a plateau.

At the end I think this can be considered as an engineering optimisation problem of scarce sources which is limited "time", therefore if I had a second chance I would choose balance more then leaning to one side of family, religion, work triangle.

ref : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66333.A_Life_Worth_Livin...

This book sounds very good. I'll order it.

Have you read the book "Scarcity"? It had a life-altering effect on me. The authors first illustrate the ways in which poor people make terrible economic decisions (spending it all in the first few days of getting a pay check, for example). Then they show how people who are always short of time -- poverty of time -- make similar irrational decisions with their scarce resource, time.

Once you are assured of a certain financial level, one needs to optimise for time.

As someone (32) in an academic 'career', I'm thinking the same ;) Rather, how similar (apart from pay) academia is to high paying jobs in IT.

I guess I just grew out of a phase, into a new one. Which one that is, I do not know yet. But I do know that time is limited, and I'm not going to spend too much on work-for-pay.

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