jrkelly

Yeah look at research group websites at major research universities that are working in your area of interest. The students are usually listed on the lab website. They’d love to be emailed.

"If you want to start a company working on a better way to build homes, gene editing, artificial general intelligence, a new education system, or carbon sequestration, you may actually be able to get it funded, even if you don’t have a degree or much experience."

I encourage anyone to give hard startups a shot, but there are tons of PhDs/Postdocs out there who would make amazing founders -- they should make the leap! Often feels to me like recent undergraduates get more encouragement to launch startups than recent PhDs/postdocs -- which is a weird miss especially when it comes to hard startups where PhDs have the advantage of deep understanding of a hard field.

hedonic treadmill is close to word you are looking for.

Agree the professor track is tough but a PhD is a great idea even if you don't want to be a professor. It's just a unique experience that both gets you deep in a specific area of science and teaches you how to conduct open-ended research in general.

Getting a PhD was one of the best decisions I ever made. You have your whole life to go optimize for making $ if you want afterwards. At a top research school in the right lab you get a 1:1 apprenticeship with a world-class expert in an area of science you are passionate about. They take 1 or 2 new apprentices a year. It's a unique experience and changed me dramatically for the better. Postdocs are a different story (only do that if you are sure you want to be a professor) but I recommend getting a PhD to anyone passionate about an area of bleeding edge hard science or engineering.