I Quit my PhD

Hi everyone,

So, I have some big news this week (admittedly spoiled by the title): I quit my PhD.

Technically the PhD is on hiatus (interruption). I've got until late 2023 to decide whether I want to return to it. This is unlikely to happen, but after discussing it with my advisor and others I was convinced that taking the reversible option was probably the better plan. Still, I think this decision has been a long time coming, and is the right one even if I decide in future to resume the PhD.

How am I feeling about it? Pretty good, honestly. The PhD had become this big all consuming thing that I was both totally failing to work on and also felt too guilty about not working on to properly commit to other things, which wasn’t a great experience. This wasn’t anyone’s fault (except, possibly, mine, but I’m not convinced I could have done much better under the circumstances), but it was still a bad situation that I’m quite glad to be out of.

Making Big Decisions

In the terminology I used last week, making big decisions like whether to quit a PhD is often difficult but not hard work. Sometimes there is hard work you can do to improve the quality of your decision making - researching to get more information and the like - but you can't just work through the decision, often you have to take the plunge.

This is a theme that I discussed with people at a London Liberating Structures group nearly three years ago and I think a lot of things we said there still hold, although one of the central things we identified does not quite work:

A theme we hit on early is that it's rarely the decision that is difficult. Once you have got to the point where you understand that there is a decision to be made, we haven't actually found that it's very hard to make it, and once we've made it we feel an incredible sense of relief. The difficulty is getting to the point where we have anything as concrete and simple as a single decision.

“Should I quit my PhD?” isn't exactly a non-obvious question. Almost every PhD student probably thinks it about once a month. The problem here is not identifying the decision, it's admitting to yourself that you're allowed to make it. I spent a long time saying “Obviously I'm not going to quit my PhD”. At the beginning of this year I decided that I would have to make it this year (see Reflections on 2020, last week I decided I could make it now and that there was an obviously correct decision.

Better Living Through Time Travel

There is in fact at least one way that I sometimes use to convert some of the difficulty of decision making into hard work.

I used it for quitting Google, where it probably saved me about six months of suffering, and it was also one of the considerations that lead to me quitting my PhD sooner than expected.

It's very simple, and consists of the following steps:

1. Set yourself an ultimatum - what you will do, by some time, if some condition is not met. e.g. “I will quit my PhD by the end of the year if I can't make it work”.

2. Time travel forward into the future and ask your future self whether the ultimatum condition went off, and if so whether the time spent getting there was worth it.

3. If it did, and the time wasn’t worth it, make the decision now instead.

If your time machine if playing up or you have moral objections to creating temporal paradoxes, you can just do the second one in your head. Rather than time travelling to the future, just ask yourself whether an outcome where you concluded the time was well spent is at all plausible. If it's not, why wait before making decision?

Making Yourself Unpopular

The main problem with this approach once you get good at it is that other people don't like it very much.

Back in On having different thresholds I wrote about how people have a problem where they assume that when you do something you have the same motivations they would when doing the thing, and this punishes a bunch of healthy behaviours when they freak out because you’re operating in a very different framework.

In this case, by learning to act before get things bad enough to force you to act, people either assume you're much worse off than you actually are and freak out a bit, or that you're in some way not taking the problem seriously.

I don't have a very good solution other than explaining your reasoning as clearly as possible and letting it be their problem rather than yours if they still don't agree. I think this is another instance of |the social obligation to be bad at things, and I'm increasingly unwilling to put up with that sort of thing.

So far I’ve been fairly lucky and everyone I’ve explained decisions like this to has been at worst confused and slightly grumpy about it, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that not being the case given less reasonable people.

What now?

Stepping back from the generalisable lessons from my quitting my PhD, what's next for me now?

The core short to medium term plan is to see if I can turn my various interesting side projects into a sustainable business. They're surprisingly close to an adequate baseline already.

In particular, I'd like to get the paid subscription base for this newsletter up a bit (my goal is by a factor of ten). This shouldn't be too hard because I've done almost no work marketing this newsletter and also there currently actually isn't any good reason to pay me, it's basically just a tip system. I don't plan to change the current free tier, but I will likely add some additional content and perks for paid subscribers. Let me know if there's anything you're particularly keen on in that regard, but I've got some ideas already.

I'm also planning to resume work on Notes on Emotions, which I'm rather embarrassed to have dropped the ball on. Partly I think it was hit by the PhD malaise, but I've also recently realised that I was writing it entirely the wrong way and that there is an easier and better way to write it. I should, with any luck, be able to get back on track with it now, and hope to have a new version out in the next week or two.

I'm also expecting to be opening up a bit more coaching capacity, and may be looking for software development contracting and consulting opportunities, but I'm not going to rush into that just yet.

In the very short term, I’m mostly just planning to sit back and enjoy my brain waking back up. It does feel an awful lot like quitting Google, and when that happened I wrote Hypothesis (and my other far more important contribution to the world of software testing, Stargate Physics 101), which was pretty fun, so I expect something interesting will happen.