Having worked on farms, with mechanics, and with grad students, I tend to believe grad students exaggerate their misery.

While not always true, most grad students I know tend to have relatively good careers, which they are comparing grad school to. They also tend to be, relatively speaking, born into good fortune with finances and healthy families. This is not universally true, of course, but more often the case than with my coworkers in aforementiones manual labor jobs.

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to ~~programming~~ grad school.

from the classic "Programming Sucks" article.

My programming job was really hard, and a lot harder than grad school in econ. I personally think domain matters a lot.

This is true.

I think a lot of complaining about grad school comes from four areas:

1. As you point out people who become grad students are often fortunate people. They already have a college degree. They are able to do well enough at school to be accepted into a graduate program. This usually means that they could be getting paid 2-15X more while doing far less work at an industry job. So in comparison grad school is miserable.

2. Unlike a top high-skill job grad school is a uncertain career track. You can find out that you spent between 3-12 years of our life with very little to show for it researching something it turns out no one, including you, cares about. The uncertainty gets to some people.

3. PhD programs can place an enormous amount of pressure on the student to be independent, have new ideas and execute those ideas well. This can be a frightening experience.

4. In some fields very strange workloads placed on the student. For instance in some labs students run experiments that require performing a task every 40 minutes for 36-72 hours straight. If the task is not performed perfectly weeks of work is lost. The experiment might involve dangerous chemicals. This is like being a long haul trucker or sound engineer.

Also 2': you come in grad school to work on thing A, sub-thing B with method/tool C and your advisor makes you work on thing X, sub-thing Y with tool Z. Working on something you don't really care is way harder and a bit soul crushing.

3': you can be in a situation were you are micro-managed and required to do tasks for your advisors slightly or not even related to your subject. In my lab we have two weekly meetings, and during the Friday on everyone need to report. I feel spending more time doing powerpoint than research.

To your point about 2 I would say that the latter half probably applies to the majority of the working population.

Which probably means that they're not exaggerating their misery.

The human experience is relative. If you're stronger than you were before you feel strong. If you're poorer than you were before you feel poor.

Manual labour jobs have about as much bearing on how a graduate student feels about their day to day as does a gazelle being eaten by a lion.

I'm not sure about your conclusion. If you've never been eaten by a lion (!) then getting a scratch from a bramble seems like hardship.

The reality is that my frame of reference for discomfort and yours are different. Hunger is a great example. Plenty of people around the world subsist with hunger as a common companion. Others maintain it's _impossible_ to do anything useful whilst hungry.

> Take yourself for instance; yesterday you were better off than you are off today but it took today for you to realize it. But today has arrived and it's too late.