Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. A graduate school sent me a questionnaire, and one question asked whether I would do my PhD again. Of course I would, I thought. What a stupid question.
And then my hand stopped on the way to the submit button. That pause is the whole episode.
Think about that moment for a second. It is that tiny, almost invisible gap between your brain saying something and your finger actually moving to make it real. It is the split second where you realize you are about to commit to a thought you haven't actually finished having. I experienced this very clearly recently.
I was sitting at my desk, looking at a questionnaire from my graduate school. They wanted to know if I would do my PhD all over again. My immediate reaction was a loud, confident "Of course." It felt like a reflex.
I actually felt annoyed by the question, like it was some obvious, low-level thing they were asking just to check a box. But as my hand moved toward the submit button, it stopped. It didn't just slow down; it froze. In that one heartbeat of hesitation, a second thought arrived.
It wasn't a clear, logical argument. It was just a sudden, heavy feeling of doubt. It was the realization that "of course" might be a lie I told myself to keep my life feeling organized. This is the part worth stealing.
We often think that our beliefs are these solid things we carry around like tools. But most of the time, they are just scripts we have rehearsed so many times that we forget we are the ones reading them. When we answer a question instantly, we aren't actually thinking. We are just hitting play on a recording.
If you get this wrong, you spend your life living inside a script you didn't actually write. You end up making massive life choices based on a "reflex" that was actually just a habit of staying comfortable. We are going to look at why that one pause matters so much. And what happens when we finally stop to look at the things we usually dismiss as too simple to be true.
That hesitation happened because my brain tried to pull a shortcut. When I thought of the word "of course," I wasn't actually looking at my life. I was looking at a script. It is the difference between an answer you have rehearsed and one you have actually examined.
If you are doing something your parents told you to do, or a job you feel you must do, or a path you have walked so many times it feels like a paved road, you are likely operating on autopilot. I felt this most clearly when I looked at that survey again. I realized my confidence was actually a form of blindness. I said: "Some of which were self-doubts, and some were doubts, in general, about my answer, about how I think about, and about whether or not 'of course' was the right answer.
This was the kind of questionnaire about which I did not think anyone would care. The graduate school probably wanted to come up with a set of report to show that most students were happy with the program. But have I ever been one of those students?" What I meant by that is that I realized I was trying to please a ghost.
I was trying to fit into a category of "happy student" because it was the easiest way to define my own existence. But that is the problem with scripts. They are safe. They give you a pre-made identity so you don't have to do the hard work of deciding who you are in every moment.
There was a man named Jean-Paul Sartre who spent a lot of time worrying about how people use these scripts to hide from their own freedom. He watched a waiter in a café and noticed how perfectly the man performed his role, and it made Sartre deeply uncomfortable. He called this bad faith, which is the way we lie to ourselves by pretending we don't have a choice. If I follow Sartre's logic, I am like that waiter when I say "of course" to the survey.
I am pretending that my life path is a fixed destination I was sent to, rather than a series of choices I am making right now. If I say I have no choice but to be a scholar, or no choice but to follow my parents' path, I am escaping the terrifying reality that I am the one holding the pen. I am choosing to be a character in a play so I don't have to feel the weight of being the author. But here is where I disagree with him.
I don't think we can ever fully escape the script. We need some scripts to function. We need to know how to be a neighbor, a worker, or a friend. The danger isn't the script itself.
The danger is when the script becomes the only thing we see. The pause I felt before clicking that button was the first crack in the wall. It was the moment I stopped being a character and started being a person who has to decide what happens next.
You might be right to push back on me here. A smart person would look at that moment of hesitation and say that it’s not a breakthrough; it’s just a mood. They would argue that my "doubt" is just a side effect of being tired or overthinking. They would say that life is mostly just a series of these scripts. And the idea that we can suddenly "wake up" and see the truth is just another romantic story we tell ourselves to feel special.
After all, if I hadn't spent six years in a program that shaped my brain, I wouldn't have the tools to even notice the script in the first place. We are products of our environment, so how can we ever truly step outside of it to see it clearly? That is a fair point. I have to be honest about my own position.
I am a product of the very system I am questioning. My ability to be critical of my life path comes from the education that gave me that path. It is a bit like a person who learns to see in the dark; they can only describe the darkness because they were taught how to navigate it. If I hadn't done the PhD, I might never have felt that "heavy feeling of doubt" because I wouldn't have had the vocabulary for it.
I would have just kept moving, feeling perfectly fine, because I wouldn't have known there was another way to be. But there is a distinction to be made between being a product of your environment and being a slave to it. You can be shaped by your history without being finalized by it. When I think about my colleague Mike, he is the perfect example of someone who has let his history become his finality.
He believes his only purpose is to follow his parents' path, get a degree, get married, and have a kid. Seriously. I would have also been much less critical about how I think about the meaning of it all. I would have been like Mike, a former colleague who I often quote whenever I need to refer to someone who doesn't give a damn about critical thinking, who believes that his only purpose in life is to follow his parents' path, which is to get a degree (any degrees), get married, and have a kid.
Seriously. When I say that, I mean that without the friction of my own doubt, I would have just been a version of him. I would have been moving through the motions because it was the path of least resistance. The "script" isn't just a tool we use; it’s a gravity that pulls us toward the easiest life.
The goal isn't to delete the script entirely—that’s impossible. The goal is to notice the gravity. It's about the moment you realize you are being pulled, and you decide, just for one second, to plant your feet.
This leads us to a very specific place in how we actually do our work. Think about the last time you were working on a project, a report, or even a simple email. You reached a point where you had to make a choice about a standard or a direction. You probably had a thought that felt like a reflex.
It was the "correct" way to do it. It was the way your boss does it, or the way the software is designed to work, or the way you've always done it for three years straight. And this is the part worth stealing. Most of our professional integrity isn't found in the big, heroic moments of decision-making.
It lives in those tiny, unexamined moments where we choose to follow the script because it is easier than questioning the script. If you are writing a piece of code and you use a shortcut because "that's just how it's done," you are hitting that submit button without the pause. You are choosing the path of least resistance. It feels like being efficient, but if you never stop to ask why that shortcut is the standard, you aren't actually making a professional judgment.
You are just being a very high-functioning part of the machine. I think about the difference between a person who knows their craft and someone who just follows a manual. The person who knows their craft is the one who can feel that heavy weight of doubt when the manual says something that doesn't feel right. They are the ones who can stop the hand from moving toward the button.
If you never feel that hesitation, you have to ask yourself if you are actually the one making the decisions, or if you are just the one executing them. I dislike Mike so much, I believe, partly because he is a reflection of who I was. I hated that part of myself when I was in my 20s. The part that seems to be critical only insofar as the conservatives would be approving of me and therefore giving me easy time. Had I not done my PhD, I would have been like that.
When I say that, I mean that I recognize the part of me that wants to just do what is expected so I can be left alone. It is a very human desire. But the work we do matters most when we refuse to let that desire become our finality. It matters when you notice that one requirement nobody questioned, and you take the extra ten seconds to ask why it exists.
That is how you move from being a character in a system to being a person who actually owns their work.
But there is a cost to this awareness. Once you start noticing the gravity, you can't just go back to being comfortably numb. You have to live in that tension. You have to decide what to do with the fact that your "reflexes" are actually just the echoes of other people's voices.
I am still grappling with the heaviest part of my own doubt, and I don't have a clean answer for it yet. I know that doing a proper PhD will expose one to unconventional ideas and will therefore make one's life more difficult. It's your choice. I have a hard life today because I am questioning everything thanks to having done the PhD.
Is it a good thing? The answer: I really don't know. It's like having opened the Pandora's Box. It is impossible to imagine what it was like before it was opened.
Q: Was it fun, though, I mean, doing a PhD? That is the question I am still sitting with. If the path of least resistance is a script we didn't write, and the path of most resistance is a struggle we aren't sure we want, where is the middle ground? How do we find a way to live that feels like our own, without becoming so exhausted by the questioning that we stop moving altogether?