I don't know. Spending several years in a funded PhD program was a far better option than anything I had available to me. It was the first time I had health insurance, for instance. I won't regret it, even if it doesn't work. https://twitter.com/JakeAnbinder/status/1264250042476609536

I think some people view it as 7ish years wasted, time you could have been climbing the career ladder? But I'm almost certain I would still be washing dishes or working tech support without it.

I feel like I have a completely different attitude to all of this. Being PhD student was a pretty good job for me, and I thought it was worth fighting to make it better, and to make it more open to people like me.

I'm not entirely sure what it would be, but I'm much better positioned to get a decent job now. Not an insignificant thing if you had no family connections and no real idea of how to be "a professional."

"Just don't go" advice always seems like it was calibrated for a very specific audience, people who might otherwise become lawyers or whatever, people who already have a decent array of options.

If your job sucks, if you feel like you have no future, and if you can find a funded program, you should absolutely consider a PhD. It's going to be much less miserable that what you were doing, especially if you're going to be doing it in the middle of a depression.

I'm too much of a coward to go back and listen to it, but I'm pretty sure I talked about this on here: