Research is my absolute favorite thing to do but everything else surrounding it I just absolutely hate and it feels draining and worthless. Ideas get dismissed without explanations (even after asking), publication process is incredibly noisy and when you get a nonsensical review (I can share) people just say "shit happens" or "weird" and then it happens again and again, and advisors and managers want weekly updates but visible progress in a project goes through wild cycles of lots of work with little to nothing to show vs low work where it looks like lots of progress is made (e.g. tuning models). It just feels like hell. I'm always thinking about my projects because they sincerely interest and captivate me but I feel like the systems we have built around what is entirely a creative process is structured for routine work. I'm being asked to do things that have never been done before -- and I love this, it is the ultimate puzzle -- but how the fuck do you expect me to give accurate ETAs and to do this 3-5 times a year and launch ground breaking work with some 2080Ti nodes and maybe one A100 node? How ground breaking of work can it be if it is done in a few months? I am supposed to do this by myself and compete against a team of Google engineers? This publish or perish paradigm is absolute bullshit and we're at a point where fucking Nvidia asked for a new PhD to have 8 top conference 1st author publications.
Therapy and medication definitely help, and I were I not to start them I, without a doubt, would have dropped out. But I think we need to have a very serious discussion about the systems that we have in place and how we're continually shooting ourselves in the foot with this fucking rat race. Maybe I'm just a bad researcher, because it does seem that there are a lot of highly successful people. But if I'm being honest, when I talk to those people I can't see anything that they are doing different other than opportunities/resources and possibly better mentoring. There are of course people that stand out and I can definitely see their genius when talking to them, but for the vast majority of researchers I really can't tell what makes the difference between making it and breaking it. I can't tell what makes a paper work and not work.
I really just want to spend my days reading math books, hacking away at ML systems, and trying to understand what this whole thing around consciousness, intelligence, and sentience is. But I don't know how to make this life. It isn't academia and it isn't industry. So how do I be born rich? Can we get to post scarcity yet?