-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people

-Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around

-Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it

-Being a stock trader: making money by spending your whole life reading company reports and hoping you're right about whether they're doing well or not

-Being a quant: using your hard earned computer science skills to move money around and turn a profit instead of helping humanity

Almost every human endeavor can be trivialized if you choose to only see one side of it.

Tenured professor here.

You're right in some sense, although I think those other fields are different in that people are honest upfront about what you're doing, and people see the value in the tediousness.

Academics, though, reached some inflection point (not too long ago really) where papers are just published, or grants proposals are written, just so it can be put on a CV. There's a huge discrepancy between the activity and its purpose, and a lot of denial about what's going on.

The denial seems to be decreasing a little, with more and more pieces like this Nature article, but I don't think the general public really understands the nature of the problems involved, nor are scientists really often honest about the nature of scientific work today.

One issue that's missing from this article is the impact of these trends on senior academics: it makes it almost impossible to move from one institution to a next, because of the volumes of young Ph.D. grads that are available. So if you are stuck in a problem institution, or in a poor institution-fit, or your spouse needs a job elsewhere, you're f*d, to put it mildly. This then creates all sorts of problems up the chain, where you have senior people whose careers would improve if they could move, and people staying would be happier, but they can't, or it takes forever. It leads to all kinds of problematic interpersonal problems that would be resolved easily in another field by someone just moving someplace else they'd be happier at. In academics, your career is often tied to a particular institution, because of the glut of qualified graduates, which is totally screwed up.

Academics has become cannabilistic. You're expected to just sort of throw yourself and your family at the altar of "science," the meaning of which is increasingly corrupted and distorted.

Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them joy.

Farmer: you're making food for people.

Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in.

I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common in healthcare in the US).

Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just selling ads.

Curiously none of the jobs you mentioned are well paid (well, I guess it depends on who you mean to include, since owning a farm or being Mario Batali probably isn't bad). But besides that I think we could do the same thing, really. A cynic could say a farmer just grows surplus corn to collect subsidies on ethanol.

Most farmers don't grow ethanol. And ethanol is a fuel, it isn't just paper, regardless of the subsidies.

As far as being well-paid: farmers are fairly well-paid. They have to work hard and use a LOT of what you might call automation (combine harvesters and the like).

But to your point: I sometimes am persuaded by the conjecture that we developed BS paper-pushing jobs for people since we've automated away farming, much of manufacturing, etc. Office Space comes to mind, too.

Well, a lot of people work on a farm who are not by any stretch of the imagination rich, and someone operating a large factory farm is probably not the image that comes to mind when you think "farmer," is what I meant to say.

As for the ethanol, it's a fuel, but without the subsidies and legal mandates would there be a good reason to use it? I'd always heard it's not really efficient and the environmental impact is negligible-to-negative, even though on the surface being renewable is good.

Ethanol mandates really kicked off in the W administration. I think it's worth remembering that at the time, the primary motivation was probably more geopolitical than climate: ethanol is domestically produced, as are many of the energy inputs (such as electricity and natural gas). The US now produces a non-trivial amount of ethanol, enough that if it were removed from the market, we'd probably import significantly more foreign oil.

But I digress.

I guess my point was that the "moral" aspect of academia (="pushing the limits of knowledge") has faded away over the last few decades.

Currently departments are pressing researchers towards output rather than long-term quality work - at least that was the key aspect of my post-doctoral experience.

This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all.

Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.

Not a big fan of academia either, but I don't see how this is any different than upper management/leaderahip positions in industry.

It's true that you need to eat the same shit, but at least upper mgmt/leadership pays much better.

I wouldn't extrapolate too far from those horror stories you heard. My experience was nothing like what you describe. Plus there are many reasons to get a PhD other than going into academia and when you're a grad student you don't have to deal with any of the politics or the other "grimy" parts (at least not in the vast majority of cases).

There are many downsides to academia, the papermill mentality that has become pervasive being a big one, but this picture of a morally bankrupt subculture where people do whatever they can to get to the top is nothing like what I experienced.

Actually, I see the same problems, but in my opinion those are symtoms. I do not know whats the real problem behind it, but it seems related to financing.

Something must have change in recent years, which changed the way scientists work nowadays. While I left academia too, I wish scientists would have the freedom to work on larger/long term subjects again.