Considering on how many people are routinely influenced by the sunk cost fallacy when making their decisions, perhaps even that awareness on when to fold is a part of the critical process a good academic goes through in the course their research. The economy and politics have forced me to pivot and without enough self-awareness to realize when to leverage some other skill or the ability to learn another set of skills based on my prior education, even if it meant moving or changing to a field that isn't immediately obvious. I think it's a useful sanity check at times.
That is sort of the point of a liberal arts education broadly, no? It's not a trade school (although I did spend my 20s at a glorified one and worked in what really was a fancy service industry gig - the law - that is partially obstructed by the sort of things at stake that we deal with, but is fundamentally a service and very much one that is customer-facing. I was one of the first few to quit from those in my graduating class that I kept touch with as well.) Owners of sports franchises, worth billions of dollars, fail to understand concepts like this. Those in charge of large companies, with externalities being constraints that we might not see in fairness but still having control of the narrative more or less, fail to demonstrate this. The government and policymakers either ignore or are ignorant of this on more occasions than one can count. Although it's hard to say what would've happened in the alternative, the initiative does alter the dynamics one would eventually have with their new situation, speaking personally. At least I'm not routinely putting in 75-80 hour weeks which is liberating in its own way even if it was routine enough that few bat an eye when put in that position at the start, judging from what my friends mostly ended up doing and not doing.
But the imposter syndrome thing does haunt as well. It takes a while to realize that one hears about plane crashes because planes not crashing do not make the news, after all, and the actual rate of crashes, incidents, and near-misses can be and usually ends up haphazardly reported at best if one doesn't dig into the official quotidian, and jargon-filled language of official reports, and I don't think that it's part of society's expectation for the average person even if it's both an apt analogy and something to look up if one has the time.
That is sort of the point of a liberal arts education broadly, no? It's not a trade school (although I did spend my 20s at a glorified one and worked in what really was a fancy service industry gig - the law - that is partially obstructed by the sort of things at stake that we deal with, but is fundamentally a service and very much one that is customer-facing. I was one of the first few to quit from those in my graduating class that I kept touch with as well.) Owners of sports franchises, worth billions of dollars, fail to understand concepts like this. Those in charge of large companies, with externalities being constraints that we might not see in fairness but still having control of the narrative more or less, fail to demonstrate this. The government and policymakers either ignore or are ignorant of this on more occasions than one can count. Although it's hard to say what would've happened in the alternative, the initiative does alter the dynamics one would eventually have with their new situation, speaking personally. At least I'm not routinely putting in 75-80 hour weeks which is liberating in its own way even if it was routine enough that few bat an eye when put in that position at the start, judging from what my friends mostly ended up doing and not doing.
But the imposter syndrome thing does haunt as well. It takes a while to realize that one hears about plane crashes because planes not crashing do not make the news, after all, and the actual rate of crashes, incidents, and near-misses can be and usually ends up haphazardly reported at best if one doesn't dig into the official quotidian, and jargon-filled language of official reports, and I don't think that it's part of society's expectation for the average person even if it's both an apt analogy and something to look up if one has the time.