While my time at Google was very exciting for me, it didn't yield any stories that friends or family ask me to retell. Compared to "the time my boss asked me to catch running circular saws he would slide down a roof at me", "that time I found a complicated XSS" just lacks pizzazz. And since I worked hard, I had fewer off hours to generate stories like "the time <well-known political figure> got so mad he called me an asshole in a room full of donors" or "the time I got second place in a drunken knife-catching contest".
The net is that based on that coarse metric of how often retellings of stories from various times in my life are requested, my life at Google was actually one of the least interesting I led, and I suspect that will be generalizable for most people without a straight-line path through life.
I am assuming, you don't really care about living an interesting life as you traded an interesting life for one that insn't.
Also, when I say "day laborer" I am not talking about educated people who do that for a while. I am talking about ppl stuck in that situation with no way out.
Why can't you simply reverse your course of action though. Now that you have better understanding of both sides of it.
These are all different, often orthogonal things.
There are people who are "stuck" in a socio-economic dead-end who still lead happy and interesting lives, nonetheless. They are able to take their situation in life and make the best of it.
The OP can do the same. He certainly has far more opportunities than a day-laborer or subsistence farmer. In a way, that abundance of choice is a burden. But nowhere is it written that PHD's are guaranteed to be "interesting", or even more interesting than anyone else.
Exactly. That contradicts the totally meaningless platitude "life is what you make of it".
So a day laborer in India has equal chance at "interesting life" than a researcher at google ?