The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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It is increasingly popular for law firms and tech companies to have "back to work" programs for people (well, realistically, women) who have taken time out of the workforce to raise children. For example. Maybe something to take into consideration on your timeline. That said...
Academia. I can't imagine anything else coming close.
Quitting law practice to teach easily slashed a million or two off my lifetime earning potential. I'd probably make the same choice again even if the difference was ten times that. I went from 60-80 hour weeks to... no longer knowing how many hours I put in most weeks, because literally no one keeps track or cares. When I bother to notice, I find I'm spending 30-50 hours "working" each week, but I rarely bother to notice. Most of it is just fun for me, and the worst part--grading--is pretty minor by comparison with the drudgery of doc review or similar lawyerly grunt work. I get about four months of vacation every year, if I want it.
The downsides are numerous and well-known. The pay is middling-to-garbage, especially given the cost of entry (a PhD, or at least a Master's for community colleges)--I'd make more money after a few years teaching in most blue state K-12 systems. Finding an actual job is exceedingly difficult, unless you're willing to teach as adjunct faculty, but adjuncting is even worse in terms of pay and workload. Pursuing tenure--and trying to get published for that--is annoying for many reasons, not least being that it's a stupid game everyone knows is a stupid game, but the whole enterprise is stuck in an inadequate equilibrium. University politics are kind of bonkers basically everywhere.
Yet in my experience all these problems are minor by comparison with the headaches I encountered in the law and corporate worlds. I think the academics most vocally complaining are those who never worked outside the ivory tower and, consequently, have no idea how good they really have it.
I don't usually recommend pursuing a PhD to anyone who can really see themselves doing anything else--but that's partly because the road is uncertain and the financial stability along the way is very, very poor. But it sounds like maybe you're in a position to weather that better than most. You probably can't do a PhD in four years, but an MA or MS can be done in 2-3 years, qualifies you to adjunct, and if you love it and are good at it, you can sometimes worm your way into a full time community college position--or even a university position if your local institution hires instructors or lecturers at the Master's level. I have many colleagues who completed a PhD while adjuncting or instructing, who became full-time faculty in their 40s or 50s.
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