Livre d'Or

I don't feel righteously furious, I feel sad and dispirited, mostly. I hate that I'm looking at people a decade or so younger than me, people with loads of potential, and trying to warn them off doing PhDs.

One of many things that's sad about this situation is that, because of our different backgrounds, if I'd decided against an academic career I could quite easily have escaped to the metropolis and got an interesting, professional job with just a first degree, without having to push myself through PhD hell. I acknowledge that you likely couldn't have done that, and that's because this country is completely messed up when it comes to social mobility, and that's a whole other rant :-/

Obviously your supervisor dying is not anyone's fault, but it's a big flaw in the system that so much depends on one person that their death can completely mess up their students' careers. I mean, if you had a normal job and your boss died, it would be sad, of course, but it wouldn't completely screw up your chances of ever getting promoted. And the way that the system responded to the death is one of the many reasons I'm angry.

And you're very obviously not lazy; I know very well how hard you work when you're not in a completely vague structureless pointless situation. Your PhD made you "lazy," or rather made it impossible to motivate yourself to work hard. Not to mention all those dozens of displacement activities activities. You're not lazy, you just got screwed over by the PhD system.