Why do older grad students become bitter?

overwork, bad salaries, competition, bad relationship with supervisors are often mentioned but I think this is not the whole picture.

I would focus more on research itself. Research can be really shitty. It's extremely open ended, so you may be a brilliant student with exams, but feel clueless about what to do when there is no clear problem and no clear solution.

Science is now extremely incremental compared to 50 years ago, meaning that you work on a tiny problem and you only try to take it forward by epsilon. This is different from the idea we often have of science as "eureka!" and revolutionary changes of paradigm. Most of our time we only aim to publish some paper on something, and move on, even without fully believing in what we're trying hard to convince reviewers of. Which is a horrible feeling.

All this causes one clear phenomenon: lack of motivation. Motivation is essential for any hard job. But it's very very hard to keep motivation high, let's be honest, on working like crazy on some project that ends up in a paper that probably almost nobody will ever read.

I don't ever want to do that again. And it's not about the salary, or my boss, or working long hours (I don't).

Another factor I’ve wondered in both myself and others: those who choose to be grad students often do so because of irrational unresolved issues or dissatisfactions with life. Grad work doesn’t help with these issues at all, only adds more problems or compounds them, and leaves you with a good amount of bitterness that you might not even understand.

Increased age or progress increases the chance that these unresolved issues are manifesting or compounding.

For me, I was looking for things in academia that just weren’t there, and I was too dumb to know what I was really looking for.

> now where's my reward I was promised?"

These people deserve more without question, but at the end of the day if this is their reaction they didn't look forward far enough.

It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. You're subjecting yourself to getting treated like absolute shit for a half a chance at a mediocre job.

I do not understand why anyone would ever choose to be an acedemic, at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions, because whenever that happens you don't get in on skill, you almost always get in based on some form of nepotism or politics, and that culture slowly destroys all organizations it's involved with.

One studies because of curiosity, not because of money.

But nobody pursues a philosophy degree for the money.

It's a question of personal values and what one wants out of life. Many people of a philosophical predilection would find it unfulfilling, a waste, "insane", to devote themselves to wealth maximization.