When you spend ten years of your life pursuing something, and you feel you have few prospects then it&#x27;s likely that you&#x27;ll continue down the same path. The attitude is better the devil you know than the devil you don&#x27;t. I left academia after my PhD because I felt that I couldn&#x27;t do another ten years in academia scraping by on $35k&#x2F;year postdoc salary... Instead I went through a couple of startups, and here I am seven years later making what I probably would have been making had I never left academia. PhDs can make you painfully unhireable. Oh the irony!