But it’s not your job to make sure the human race progresses. That’s too big a job for any one person. And it wasn’t just one person who made all the advances that got us out of the stone age. It was a number of people, not all of whom were employed as professional researchers. Albert Einstein was underemployed as a patent clerk when he came up with the theory of special relativity, for example.
The thing about scientific discoveries is, it’s common for more than one person to come up with the same thing around the same time. (Usually only the first one gets credit). Newton and Leibniz both came up with calculus around the same time, and someone else (I forget who) was close to coming up with general relativity around the same time Einstein did. It’s not like some discovery is likely to be forever lost to humanity if one person doesn’t come up with it at the right time- more likely, someone else will find it a few years later.
If you obeyed that rule all the time, you wouldn’t pay off your credit card every month and live within your means, since that would be bad for the overall economy. But it’s good for you as an individual to do those things. It’s not always bad to choose the thing that is best for you as an individual, even if it might be better for other people if you did something else.
And just what do you think would happen if everybody became a research statistician, anyway? Who would grow the food and fix things when they break?
How do you know that all the good sons (and daughters) out there don’t sometimes dread helping their parents? Maybe they just don’t tell anybody how much they dread it. That’s not at all the same thing as not dreading it, but it looks identical to anyone else. You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.
It just doesn’t work that way. Medications for depression or anxiety are not going to change who you are. Nor are they going to make you content with any situation life throws at you. Depression that is treated with medications isn’t the same thing as being depressed because your job sucks or you have to take care of a difficult relative.
The thing is–and I have been told this before–doctoral students are investments for the university, since they’re often funded. I know I’m a person, but to the department, I’m just an investment–something they want a return on. Their return is in the form of prestige, I’m told. If they can say, “Well, so-and-so got his doctorate from Texas Tech,” it makes the university look good. And the reality is that research is more valued than teaching at all the “good” schools people talk about. If I go to a teaching school, I’m giving the department a lower ROI than they bargained for when they decided to admit me.
Is it wrong to wish–not to believe, but to wish–that I didn’t have to believe in getting better in order to get better? If I have a sinus infection, I don’t have to believe I’ll get better as long as I take my antibiotics. I don’t have to do anything but rest.
I know I need to “engage” myself in getting better, but how does one get over the hump of even caring about living enough to try? I don’t have a wife, kids, or a great job to “get back to” once I’m out of the pits. I have a girlfriend (who I suspect also has depression, but who knows) and parents who are so blinded by love for me that I can do no wrong in their eyes. I know I’m very fortunate to have people who love me, but I don’t know if it’s the “right” kind of love. I almost feel as if they’re enabling me.
Dude, if it were an important paper all those other papers would be citing it. That’s the point of a literature survey - it should be obvious when reading up on the literature of a specific area that there are a certain number of very influential studies/papers, and then a bunch of other ones. Make sure you understand the big dogs thoroughly and have a pretty big handle on what the papers that cite them think about them. Think about the big picture - don’t get so bogged down in the little details that you lose sight of the field as a whole.
And seriously, Texas Tech would fuck you over in a heartbeat if it thought that would make it a dime. Texas Tech is not your friend, your wife, or your family. You may owe the people you work with something, but you don’t owe an institution like that shit. Do what you need to do for you - certainly don’t do it for the prestige of an institution you don’t even seem to like all that much.
There’s something between East Carolina Polytechnic and Harvard, you know - have you considered teaching at a small four year liberal arts college? The emphasis is on teaching more than research, the kids are motivated, and there’s more prestige if that’s important to you.
Thing is, research universities turn out a lot more grad students than there are research jobs available for. The number of research faculty positions is not increasing, or is not increasing much. But it’s not unusual (at least in astronomy) for one professor to train 15 students, then open one position when s/he retires. And it’s not as if you can be a researcher and not train grad students, or only train one grad student- you probably wouldn’t get tenure if you did that.
My point is, they’re not looking out for you, so you shouldn’t feel too obligated to look out for them.
If you don’t look out for your own interests as a person, who will? Your university won’t. Your eventual employer, academic or otherwise, won’t. You don’t exist solely to provide someone else with a return on an investment, and you should not live your life as if that were the most important thing.
I don’t think so. But then again, I’m Jewish (though I haven’t always been), and I believe that it’s what you do or don’t do, not what you think, that counts for whether you’re a good person or not.
If you had a wife and kids, you think you’d be fixed, huh? Good luck with all of that. Realistically, don’t you think you’d be utterly convinced you’d fucked up your entire life and now were putting your family’s on the line, and that you were letting them down, that you couldn’t handle the pressure, and so on? I think a lot of guys view a stable relationship and the responsibility of fatherhood as a way out of having to think about themselves and their own problems, and I think that’s a surefire method of ensuring there will be another generation with those same problems.
But really, it just isn’t plausible. I don’t know, of course, but I’m willing to bet that you felt the same way about other situations that have since come to pass. Maybe you thought if you only had a girlfriend, then you wouldn’t bla bla bla. Or that once you got to graduate school, you would do this and that. Or if you started exercising regularly then all these problems would go away because whatever. Meanwhile it turns out that solving one problem… solves one problem. And it helps, the solution to the one problem, but there are going to be others. Any other way of looking at it – of telling yourself everything would be different if this or that was true – is just a recipe for catastrophizing the outcome when holy shit, one of those things actually happens, but it doesn’t change your life.
Those aren’t the things that are going to work for you. The only real, practical advice I can give you, the only secret of the universe I have access to (which, let’s be clear, I stole from all the legitimately happy people I ever met), is this: find out what makes things better, even a tiny little sliver better, and do that. Repeat. The rub is that you aren’t going to want to let yourself do it – you’re going to judge the results you get overly harshly, and you’re going to think you should be happier with one thing or another, regardless of whether or not you are, and a lot of other tricks you’ll pull on yourself. But the ultimate goal is to actually figure out what you really, no bullshit, want out of life. Once you have even the foggiest idea about that, you’re golden. You just try to get closer. It has very little to do with belief, the way I think about it. It’s the scientific method.