From my experience, people in the corporate world tend to be all that and also low on IQ.

I see no reason to commit before you get to know your supervisor/boss well.

At the office you do 40 hours a week making bank, doing a PhD you live it 24/7 at will be lucky to save. You listen to your friends talk about their vacation, hobbies, and families. You are uncertainty about you abilities, in addition to willful academic fraud. Then you depend on an adviser who views you as a tool for personal glory, and doesn't feel morally obligated to act different because they were treated in the same manner. The only thing that will get you through is love of your work but you most likely already compromised on those dreams. This is the experience of many PhD in the physical sciences, who do experiments all day and will never become professors.

I took more or less one of the paths described in the article (internship -> undergrad -> drop out -> startup -> startup -> startup -> research lab), and everything seems like a mess in its own way and I feel like why I'm not wrapping burritos now is out of luck/ meeting people along the way/ hacking my way through this mess.

At this point, I can't imagine going to academia or industry through traditional means, it's just too much of a mental drain to watch how expectations don't match reality in everything around me, despite being pitched constantly on otherwise.

I am finishing my BSc at the UK-based Open University. It is 100% online, legitimate, reasonably rigorous and quite well respected, at least in the UK. You can transfer up to 2/3 of the degree from previous studies. Many courses are not available outside of Europe though.

Two alternatives are Canadian Athabasca University and University of London International Programmes.

Aging.

It is so extremely sad that society is so evil that this makes a big news.

However deep in shit they are, people can find "beauty" in it. It is a defence mechanism. But why not see things as they really are?

Neither "beauty" nor "shittiness" are part of how things objectively are, but rather things we project onto the world by how we relate to it. Why not, when given the choice, project the former?

"...there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Reminded me of

> Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.

Agreed, this post is essentially an ode to stockholm syndrome.

Neither beauty or despair is intrinsic in anything, it makes no sense to view things in terms of a single absolute. Growing up is about coming to terms with the shades of grey.

Airbnb. It still amazes me how playing huge video clips in the background adds to the experience without being distracting.

yes! That's a great example!

Such a retarded question. Do you trust food delivered in Ford?

Transferwise! For payments from the US to my country (EU) there is a fixed 1% fee. In addition, their exchange rate is 3% better than in my local bank. Clients send the money with ACH or wire transfer. I have it in my bank after two days. Overall, much faster and cheaper than Paypal or international transfers.