I feel you on the 'life' part. Only people that have been deeply commited to academia, and realizing its role in this era, can understand the emotional impact on this choice.

Quick question for you and the GP, if you would be so kind:

I'm currently working on a project which is set to become my master's thesis (I'm writing my final undergrad exams this month). I started it a few weeks ago; before that I never thought I would go to grad school and I had a severe distaste for academia.

Now I'm feeling academia suck me in. It's hard to describe, but I'm "good" at the aspects of academia that I hate--the bizarre politics of it, for one. I also really enjoy having the freedom to work on hard problems without any immediate paths to monetisation.

Do I get out now? Is it okay to do this for a while? I am obviously not asking strangers on a message board to make my life decisions for me, but I'm very curious to hear your thoughts.

An academic career was my dream job while I was an undergrad, but it disappointed me later when I actually reached that goal. I'd say go for it if you feel it'll be rewarding, but don't stick with it out of stubbornness when it no longer makes you happy. There's more freedom waiting elsewhere if you don't shun the responsibility (in entrepreneurship). But just because it didn't work for me, it doesn't mean it's generally bad. Many people seem to be quite happy working in academia.

Could you explain what you mean by "its role in this era"? Do you believe academic institutions are becoming more or less relevant?

got any tips/resources for an aspiring emulator programmer? I find emulation fascinating, I've always wanted to write an emulator for my favorite console (neo geo) but I'm mostly a CRUD programmer without a lot of comp architecture knowledge.

You'll need precise and complete documentation of the CPU and other hardware, which is not too hard to find nowdays (17 years ago it was mostly books and they were incomplete/wrong).

You can probably go a long way just by programming by the specifications with some literature on designing interpreters, but good assembly language skills on the emulated system will be extremely useful, because that's what you'll be looking at all the time while debugging.