outstanding features : Work more than you ever will in your life but earn a petty wage :angry-place: Academia is full of elders who formed a caste system which it will take you years to enter, if you even can. The pursuit of knowledge is secondary to funding concerns. :mao-shining: become alienated from your fellow workers :no-workers: be crushed by 18-wheeler on your way to Uni :no-carnism:
im done
Once upon a time I was on track to become a linguist. Had a doctoral program lined up and everything. Then I had a breakdown after I started publishing research because I realized nearly all of what gets published is extraneous bullshit. So much intentional filler, only good for the petty ego games academics are constantly playing with each other. The best most work can hope for is to be passed around by a couple liberal boomers, who nod at it for a few seconds before throwing it in some bottomless archive, never to see the light of day again.
Anyway I flunked out and went back to working retail.
Some child of a professor I know from uni and I talked, she was doing linguistic research (which can be good). More specifically about the efficiency of phrases and slang depending on target demographic (think gender, age, income, academic status) in advertisement for luxury brands and I mentioned that I feel that people who actually do work in a super market do deliver more labor beneficial to most people, when she diminished people driving buses (who wants to do that?).
Like work doesn't have to be good, but work that is academic doesn't make it better than filling needed tasks (of stocking, ordering, unpacking etc. goods).