There’s a sentence a lot of people thinking about leaving academia say to themselves, usually late, usually alone.
My PhD will have been wasted.
Why leaving academia can feel like wasting your PhD
It sounds like a conclusion when you say it. And most people leave it as is, because arguing with it feels like arguing with a fact.
But look at what the sentence is actually doing. Wasted, compared to what? It assumes a PhD only counts if it leads to one specific destination, and that anything else erases everything that came before it. Hand that reasoning to a colleague in a draft and they’ll send it back. No comparison, no defined terms, a conclusion standing in for an argument it never made.
You know how to do this. You’ve spent years reading other people’s claims and asking what’s actually holding them up. The habit doesn’t switch off just because the claim this time is about your own life.
So apply it. What would “wasted” need to mean for the sentence to be true? Probably something like: the degree only has value if it leads to a professorship, and any other outcome counts as failure. Now ask the question you’d ask of any claim built that way. Where did that standard come from, and who benefits from you holding yourself to it?
Where did the idea that your PhD only leads to academia come from?
For a lot of people, that standard has been reinforced for years inside academia. Inside academia there’s a narrative, repeated so often it stops sounding like an opinion, that if you leave you’ll fail, that no one outside will take you seriously, that you’ll be starting from nothing. Your mentors say it because they believe it. Say it enough times to someone and it stops sounding like a claim you should check. It starts sounding like a fact about yourself.
A guest on my podcast described living inside exactly that logic. She’d been told, repeatedly, that her degree only qualified her to become a professor and nothing else. When she started to doubt that path, she landed in real despair over it. Why did I do this degree, she wondered, if it has left me with fewer options than before, not more? She hadn’t actually run out of options. She had repeatedly been given the message that she had.
And that’s the red flag: a conclusion that nobody ever asked you to look at is worth looking at now.
How to examine the belief that your PhD was wasted
Here’s the method, in full, the way you’d run it on anything else.
Write the sentence down exactly as it runs through your head. Ask what standard would have to be true for it to hold. Ask where that standard came from and whether it survives being said out loud to someone outside academia. Ask who benefits if you never ask.
Run “my PhD will have been wasted” through that and it stops looking like a fact. It’s an unexamined inheritance from people with a reason to hand it to you.
You don’t have to decide anything today. You just have to stop letting the sentence stand without examining it, which is the one thing you’d never allow anywhere else.