Livre d'Or

I'd offer myself as an example of it being possible to do reasonably well out of a PhD without actually loving the field at all. (Why did I do it without one ? Because at the time I was still only barely overcoming extreme shyness and it offered a less terrifying prospect than interviewing for industry jobs.)

I did the first two years of my PhD in a work environment that was mostly extremely pleasant day by day, with a somewhat grumpy more senior grad student, and a supervisor who largely tended to ignore me - I was coming off a final undergrad project with a supervisor who wanted daily meetings and progress reports, and I found that scale of freedom possibly more appealing than was absolutely best for me at the time. Then my supervisor opted to move to a different institution for family reasons which in retrospect I can sympathise with (there being precious little for small kids in Cambridge in the mid1990s, that I ever found when Papersky (edit: that was linking to a DW journal which is not lj papersky) and zorinth visited at any rate), and insisted I had to move with (which is also, in retrospect, understandable; I do not think I would have done well with remote supervision). The social environment I was in for the last year and a half was very much not to my taste, though, and lacking in the supportive social group I had in Cambridge, and hugely not aided by my father misparsing my deep unhappiness at being in my new location as me considering dropping out and spending an awful lot of time and energy trying to "persuade" me not to and not hearing that I had already considered the options and made the decision to go through with it before moving at all (sfaict, fifteen years later he's still convinced he talked me out of it) ; the ways in which I came out of all that very stressed and underweight (I do now, and did even more then, react to stress by sleeping a lot and forgetting to eat, sometimes on a scale of days) were not primarily to do with the PhD system per se. (Being quasi-stalked for a couple of months during the last year did not help either.)

OK, I can tell by the way my shoulders are tightening that setting this down is stressier than I thought it would be, but I did have a point in there somewhere. Which was that I can see how having a supportive supervisor, a good group of local friends*, and a subject one is passionate about could help, but that one can get through without those things without it turning as bad as some of the stories in above comments get, Also, do check whether potential supervisors might be planning to change institution midway through the PhD if you can. And it has, on the whole, enabled rather a lot of awesome stuff the subsequent fifteen years.

*I did have plenty of good online friends and nothing I say here should be construed as lack of regard for how much they helped.