Why Does This Matter?

I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so: Why does this matter?  I avoided asking myself this question because I knew the answer would be painful.

I ended up in physics through stubbornness, and an unusual willingness to suffer for the sake of grades. As an undergraduate, I was not particularly passionate about quarks, quasars, or quantum mechanics, but I was academically very competitive, and once I’d settled on physics as my major I determined to place myself at the top of my class. I did so by throwing myself into the hardest classes and putting in the hours required to ace the tests. This was, to put it mildly, a bad idea. I got a sort of grim pleasure from vanquishing my classmates in these academic slogs, but I was basically miserable. So why’d I keep it up?

When multiple people are striving towards a shared goal, they often rank themselves by progress within their peer group. This was my mistake — I swapped an absolute goal (figuring out how bits of nature work) with a relative one (scoring higher on tests than my classmates). Later, when I found myself unhappy, I couldn’t leave without feeling like I’d lost something. That social capital sunk cost was the first part of the trap I found myself in.

The second was a positive feedback loop that encouraged me to spend ever-increasing amounts of time on my work. Humans inherit convictions mimetically from each other — we learn what to value by imitating our peers. As my desire to excel academically grew, I spent greater amounts of time in and around the physics department. The more time I spent there, the greater my desire to excel. I’d never given physics much thought at all before my senior year in high school — but once I was surrounded by other physics students, competing for the same pool of grades and research positions, I could think of little else. This inherited desire was unchecked because I had no life outside of academics — no fixed reference point. Although quitting would have made me happier, I felt like I had nowhere to quit to. My tunnel vision left me with few concrete notions of alternative pursuits, and without a destination, I could not seriously contemplate leaving. 

Plans are never plausible until they contain specifics, and implausible plans tend to be discarded. Many of my peers in physics only added incredulity, consciously or otherwise. The result was a reality distortion field — quitting was not just painful, but unimaginable, unthinkable. I ended up in graduate school not because I wanted to toe the bleeding edge of natural science, but because I simply couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable. If you value the process itself, that’s fine. I didn’t. Cowardice kept me from acting on this, and after a while I came to believe I had to succeed in this field I’d fallen into essentially by chance.

“Why does this matter?” is an excellent way to gauge if you’ve drifted into a mimetic trap. If you find this question impossible to answer honestly, you’re probably wasting your time. Getting out is the hard part — that requires courage and diligent planning. It’s much easier to avoid falling in. But in either case, you’ll benefit from building a system that steers you towards productive, meaningful activity in the long run.