I so wish I could do beautiful coding work but societies are not aligned with beauty (even at zero cost) so i'm bailing toward financial independance and peace of mind. Hopefully you and I can make time to join club or do thinking on our own terms.
Reminds me of a thought that's been sitting in my quotes file for a while.
"What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart people, arrange to do short one-off research projects and simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property quickly and easily, and move on to another conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can’t do that in industry. Can’t do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience, scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few mathematicians and social scientists do, too."
-- Bill Tozier, Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006
https://web.archive.org/web/20120625133020/http://williamtoz...
(And personally, I do want it too.)
I can also generalize that to human existence. I've struggled with work life a lot, I've seen good people going robbers, depressed.. but 90% of them came in the morning with the best intentions.. somehow in this system, naturally a sad state of chaos emerges that makes most people very frustrated if not more.
How did I encounter that quote? I have no idea. I thought I found it on HN, but going by HN search, I can only find myself posting it, twice before in the last 5 years. I must have found it elsewhere.
I saved it, because it strongly resonated with me - it describes what I would love to do for a living, and what I also think the society needs to improve both research and engineering.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Erdos
> Erdős would show up—often unannounced—on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare “My brain is open!” and stay as long as his colleague served up interesting mathematical challenges.
(More anecdotes here: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/ho...)
My thought at the time was; If I want to do physics full time, I better make it rich first. I saw that the tenure track academic route seemed very far from my naive teenage dreams of what being a physicist would mean, and it was unrealistic that I'd even get accepted into grad school not being fully straight As. Currently enjoying a pretty decent career developing software for banks, so I can't say I regret my decision, esp. after reading articles like this.