Thanks for sharing. Keep that level of naivety and ignorance! ☺ I also disagree with some warnings out there, especially those who said that “love of learning” is not a good enough reason for doing a PhD. Everyone has their own experience. And based on my experience, those who got misery in their PhD are:

• Annoyed by the fact that scientific thoughts go home every night with us. These people may not love deep learning or may not like their research topic so they don’t have that constant curiosity off hours.
• Not sharing the same values as their supervisors. I learned from a PhD community that supervisors influence 50% of our PhD success. For example, my suvervisors didn’t ask me to publish in certain journals. As long as it is out there, it will be discovered.
• Not having independence to set research questions. PhD in Europe mostly get funded by a project instead of the student bringing own topic and find funding. In my case, it was only half of my PhD to be submitted to the project, yet my supervisors said good to all my research questions. They only provided me with critical insights that helped me decide on which question to pursue.

I enjoyed doing my PhD also because it was in Netherlands, known for decent working hours and weeks of leave per year. The office was quiet by 6 PM.

However I left academia because:

• The “publish or perish” culture. If only I can get thoroughly curious and publish only every 3–5 years, that would be great.
• The lack of support for publishing failures compared to publishing successes. Now that I am in industry, people are actually curious about academic results. They wonder why it is difficult to find publications about what failed, so they don’t have to try the same route. It is why academics become consultant. It is where they can share the failure stories to answer industry’s questions.

I stretched my writing period to more than a year, because I was starting independent projects. I was eager to leave and apply my knowledge of successes and failures to non-academic projects. 5 years since then, the knowledge I obtained during my PhD is endlessly applicable. I am not interested to go back to academia to gain new knowledge, because applying the knowledge itself has too many interesting problems to solve (especially in my field human-centered design).

All the best!