>>11433316I'm someone who has only lived the academic experience, and after the PhD continued there (post-doc, now a professor).
All throughout this time I worked with people, directly and indirectly, that came from other walks of life, especially from R&D departments of big companies. They'd always say exactly what you are saying. "Oh I wish I could just live this academic life, it's so much better, boohoo, my job is so hard".
You know what all of those people had in common? They never published a single god damn fucking thing in their entire """"academic"""" life, and never will.
PhDs feel easy for people like you because you are absolutely useless as researchers and generate exactly 0 impactful results. In a company you can just fumble your shit around and dig holes and fill them back up and meet the required quota for your boss, but if you actually want to be a good researcher it can be at the very least as stressful, and in my experience much more, than a regular job.
I have never seen a regular working Joe take his work home or spend the night over at the laboratory trying to crunch out more results, make more measurements, or whatever the fuck. People working 9 to 5 jobs get home and watch netflix and forget about their work on weekends. That is absolutely not true for a good PhD student or a researcher. Every waking moment of your life is dedicated to your research and most of them have terrible sleeping habits which eventually deal to family issues and mental health issues as well.
