>>12881809I've been struggling with this as well.
I think you have to be honest with what you want and go from there.
I was in math. I always loved math and found it "beautiful".
I did secretly judged people in who asked questions like "why do we need to learn this? why is this useful?". I thought they were just not smart enough to understand the beauty of if and how it generalized many useful concepts.
During my 4th year I took some grad courses. I remember thinking to myself "why do we need to learn this?".
I was being filtered.
I got my degree and gtfo'd.
I always did a bit of programming on the side for fun (flash games when those were still a thing) so I was able to transition into tech.
Turns out I don't really like math in general. I like math that's easy for me to understand. I was lucky that this was all of high school math and a good part of my undergrad (but not all, I failed some courses, but I didn't feel bad about those because "they weren't interesting topics" so I wasn't really trying in the first place, at least I told myself. But now I think I didn't find them interesting because they were hard).
I also thought that I didn't care about other people's opinions. Turns out knowing that people think I'm smart is really important to me for some fucked up reason. Whenever I look at my friends that went on to get PhDs or have a more prestigious position than me, I feel shit.
But at the same time, I really really really don't regret getting out of academia. Having money and hobbies is good.
I'm still not sure if I should have tried harder...
But yeah, be honest with yourself. Know what you want and do what it takes to get it.
If you really want to go in academia, try harder every time you fail. Otherwise, move on to something else.
If you really want to start a business, try harder every time you fail. Otherwise, move on to something else.
If you just want a simple life move on to something else, but make sure that's what you want.
