Don't Become A Literature PhD

A long slate article about how going for a literature PhD will make you an emotional train wreck.  Have you noticed this trend?  Every article tell people what not to do - don't follow my footsteps.  Don't do this profession.  The life is horrible, etc, etc.  We can't all not do stuff - so what's the math?  Should we all sell insurance?

I think it's admirable to follow your passion and go for the gold.  Why not?  You only live once.  I think the caveat people need to take, however, is to be honest with themselves with whether they are capable of achieving it and whether they are on track to.  And if your dreams don't pan out - no big deal - move on to something else and then you tried and learned along the way it wasn't in the cards for you.  What plagues younger folks, unnecessarily, is this idea of failure being all-consuming.  From the article:

By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)

These are not the thoughts of a mature, well balanced person.  Successful businessmen try and fail with ideas all the time.  They spend years building businesses for them to fail.  So what?  They start anew.  If you love books and wanted to be a PhD, I'm sure there are plenty of high school English jobs out there.  Sure, you're overqualified.  So what?  Teaching young people to be passionate about something - I don't see how that is such a waste of a life.  Shit, work at a library.  Open a bookstore.  Write book reviews.  I don't know - it strikes me there is plenty of jobs one could do with a literature PhD.  Get a job at a coffee shop and run a book club.  I don't know.  Is this so horrible?  Teaching your friends and community members more about your field of expertise.  Do it as a hobby.

All of this is why I believe you should try things you enjoy or at least find tolerable.  Or maybe you just want to earn money and have health insurance and coach your kids baseball teams -- and that's admirable too.  We put too much on "what do you do for a living" when we are young as if it matters.  Ask old people how much they think about work.  I doubt very much.