Academia is a scam. I warn younger frens away from it whenever I can.

Oh yes, you'll spend your 20s learning & doing something you love - and for minimal debt if you're lucky. You'll be told & tell yourself that education is a beautiful & noble thing, a thing good in itself.

If your lucky, you'll be degreed by your early 30s - & then spend the rest of that decade working bottom of barrel jobs, keeping head low, trying to publish so you don't perish.

If you're lucky, you might get a good, stable job at a respected school by the time your 40. And then what? Then you can start to make a name for yourself. But you're still keeping head down, keeping quiet, telling yourself you're making difference.

You will think fondly of your time as a student, when the love of what you learned was still fresh and you were in your youth. And so you will try to foster that for others.

If you help one soul seek truth, you say, it will all have been worth it.

But will it? You are not in your prime. If you are honored, you probably lack integrity. You have compromised w/ a system that sees no value in what you do, and would get rid of you if given the chance.

And this is just normal pressures of academic market & system. Add the ideological drain, the need to constantly hide even the most basic, reasonable views. The fear of your colleagues and the hatred you will receive. Why would you want to go through that?

You will debase yourself for a noble dream. You will be even more of a fool than Don Quixote. But it will be worth it, you tell yourself, as you fade into oblivion.