my life needs to be generally pleasant otherwise, and the work needs to be at least somewhat meaningful. I’ve tried the “just grit your teeth and toil” mentality, and it doesn’t work—maybe for someone else it does, but not for me.
The first part is the part I’m calling into question, not the second. Of course you need to be electrified by your work. It’s hard to do great things when you’re toiling instead of playing.
But your standards for general pleasantness are, as far as I can tell, the sieve for a lot of research fields. As an example, it is actually harder to be happy on a grad student/postdoc salary; instead of it being shallow to consider that a challenge, it’s shallow-mindedness to not recognize that that is a challenge. It is actually harder to find a mate and start a family while an itinerant academic looking for tenure. (Other examples abound; two should be enough for this comment.) If you’re having trouble leaving your network of friends to go to grad school / someplace you can get paid more, then it seems likely that you will have trouble with the standard academic life or standard corporate life.
While there are alternatives, those tend not to play well with doing research, since the alternative tends to take the same kind of effort that you would have put into research. I should comment that I think a normal day job plus research on the side can work out but should be treated like writing a novel on the side- essentially, the way creative literary types play the lottery.
The first part is the part I’m calling into question, not the second. Of course you need to be electrified by your work. It’s hard to do great things when you’re toiling instead of playing.
But your standards for general pleasantness are, as far as I can tell, the sieve for a lot of research fields. As an example, it is actually harder to be happy on a grad student/postdoc salary; instead of it being shallow to consider that a challenge, it’s shallow-mindedness to not recognize that that is a challenge. It is actually harder to find a mate and start a family while an itinerant academic looking for tenure. (Other examples abound; two should be enough for this comment.) If you’re having trouble leaving your network of friends to go to grad school / someplace you can get paid more, then it seems likely that you will have trouble with the standard academic life or standard corporate life.
While there are alternatives, those tend not to play well with doing research, since the alternative tends to take the same kind of effort that you would have put into research. I should comment that I think a normal day job plus research on the side can work out but should be treated like writing a novel on the side- essentially, the way creative literary types play the lottery.