I'd been working as a research assistant in a university lab during and after my undergraduate degree, for about a year, and my supervisor was trying to convince me to do a PhD with him.

However, I'd already had several months of getting to know PhD students there and in neighbouring labs, and it made me realise two things. Firstly, how much stress and long working hours they were all enduring. Secondly, for many of them, how fascinated they seemed with their research topics despite this.

I quickly realised I didn't really give much of a shit about doing any more of this research, at least not compared to the obsessive PhD students I was working alongside, and ended up pivoting to a vulnerability research career instead. Which has been much, much more rewarding and interesting than anything I was doing previously.

I'm incredibly glad I didn't get stuck wasting my life away in academia, which for a time seemed like the default path to take. For a while afterwards I felt like I'd let myself down somehow by not continuing along this path, but I look back in relief knowing now what a nonsense attitude that was.