What does any of this have to do with physics?

Apologies for the brain dump but this resonated strongly with me. I think there will always be part of me that wonders "what if" I had decided to give a post-doc a try. But I know deep down that I wouldn't have been happy chasing post-docs hoping for some placement at a mid-tier university. But I look back on my time traveling for math, making friends, exploring ideas as my happiest.

Two moments stick out to me as damage that I wasn't able to shake:

• Much like the author we were talking about fiber bundles. Working through some proof of some esoteric feature. Proving things requires using functors, a relatively simple concept but functors come in two flavors one flavor maintains relationships and the other flip the relationship. We represent these relationships with arrows. In a moment of exasperation I exclaimed "so many damn arrows, this way that way it's just a mess!" The prof leading us (my advisor's husband) simple said "Then this must be hard for you." I don't think he meant it pejoratively but he has a reputation for being direct, terse, and had made other grad students cry in this section. I didn't respond but that moment definitely introduced some self doubt I had a hard time recovering from.
• The second memory comes from my 4th year. I had been invited to a "summer school" where promising grad students gather with leading researchers in a beautiful lakeside retreat center. Everyone is well taken care of with lobster dinners, your own quaint cabin, and a quiet forest surrounding. The first day researchers posted questions they had on the wall and students gathered to ask questions and decide what problem they wanted to work on. The idea being each group would lay the foundations for a paper within the week. I was the first to pick one problem suggested my a researcher. It was an area I didn't know much about but it sounded like the crux would be a computation that I could figure out. I recruited a close friend and then we were joined by two young but promising MIT professors (probably my first sign this would be hard).
  We worked ALOT 15 hour days. It started off good, I was able to contribute quite a bit initially with some random stuff I knew from other papers I had authored. We ended up resolving the main question in the first two days. But that ended up opening a can of worms I never recovered from. Once we had the result my co-authors launched into building a complete translation of a field that had laid dormant for 15 years using the framework we had used to make the computation. And I was left I the dust. I'd sit with them quietly all day, go to my cabin to sleep, and receive emails of new ideas and papers to read as they continued working separately throughout the night. I was exhausted, lost, and a distinct feeling of not being fit for this job. We wrote out first draft of the paper over the last couple days.
  The group appointed me the person responsible to make our presentations to the community at large so I ground in deeper following all the threads they had laid out for me. But I felt like I was being coached rather than really understanding the work "we" had done. A year later I was asked to present the work in the annual AMS meeting, where again I dedicated myself to learning what this document with my name on it actually said. I was honored to see some mathematicians I admire in attendance and they gave some words of encouragement.
  But I felt broken. I decided about that time that I wasn't going to stay in academia. I was invited to present work from this project at other universities. I accepted, then turned it down, and covid hit. My co-authors have built a cottage industry out of that paper and I regularly get notifications of new citations.

I love math but the pay and hours isn't a lifestyle that I want. At least that's what I tell myself, part of me wonders if I was just weak or scared of success. During this whole saga my marriage fell apart. Like the author I was living on subsistence wages. I was homeschooled and so barely learned the basics until enrolling myself in community college at 18. Which I dropped out of during my first attempt only returning again to school at 25. But those feel like excuses; the opportunity was there I just had to quit.

That was a very good read, and relatable, as someone who dropped out of academia. It struck me a lot like imposter syndrome too - it's easy to have high expectations of yourself that aren't necessarily mirrored in those around you, or required to be good at your job, whatever it happens to be.

I read this article back in undergrad and although I did not know it at the time, I think it served as a very useful beacon to not go down the high-energy physics route. Not that I think that field is inherently bad or somehow doomed, but rather this article made me realize I was only choosing that path because of the prestige I thought it conferred. I have been much happier since I "switched" to cosmology. I am still in academia for the time being but have no illusions that this will be my entire career. If I could land a job doing research full time in a location I liked, I would be thrilled. I feel very fortunate to even have the opportunity that I currently do to explore ideas like this, for some portion of my life. But eventually I will likely have to switch to industry, which I am not too excited about but also don't hate. Academia has a lot of problems, as this article points out.