When I was first thinking about leaving my physics PhD program, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I was talking to a friend about the possibility of taking a few months off to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. He said that was the stupidest idea he’d ever heard of, and explained that I’d never figure out what I wanted to do by think... See more

Another thing to remember is that no job is perfect. Every job has sucky parts. The question is whether you enjoy the other aspects of your job enough to tolerate the aspects you don’t like. Thus, every job requires discipline, which one commenter described as the “ability to push through unpleasant, but necessary things to reach a goal”. But with ... See more

this search for a meaningful job is not solved by thinking about it, but instead by trying things out. That doesn’t necessarily mean trying different jobs, and immediately quitting them if they don’t feel right. As I mentioned in my small steps post, there are a number of possibilities to learn more about a job before doing it.

• You could do an infor

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