Did I underachieve in life?

100%!

Also be weary of the potential (IMO) misleading hope that further degrees are useful after a certain age / point of your career.

As a general rule, the “younger” you do this in your career (i.e. the shorter your career), the better your potential benefit, especially if you change jobs. Just simply because recruiters and potential hiring managers will use your degrees to judge your capabilities instead of evaluating your actual capabilties - it’s just easier for them to do so.

Additional degrees after a certain age are not detrimental, but after having reviewed probably thousands of CVs I would look at these exactly as @Burningstone decribes them: not helping you much careerwise, but perhaps interesting to you personally. At best, the hiring manager would conclude that it’s perhaps a good sign that the applicant is interested in further educating themselves, even if it’s not for an immediate career advantage.

3 Likes

What made you feel so guilty?

I was the top 1% of students at the university but that was because I was so poor that I wouldn’t be able to afford to study without the tuition, and with 30% unemployment rate back then in Elbonia, and a general poverty in the country, that was my to be or not to be. I was feeling guilty of pursuing the easiest faculty instead of the one I was really interested in and self-studying. It took me something about 20 years to finally realize that university didn’t matter at all, for me it was just low paying job (but stable) allowing me to study for the career I wanted.

Speaking about career… I felt into the trap of “things going fine” in Elbonia, where I got a job paying enough not to worry about basic things, and since I was still relatively young, I wanted to enjoy my life finally… so I wasted another 10 years only to migrate to Switzerland with something like 20k CHF wealth in the age of 36. I don’t regret the move at all, but I also don’t regret any more that I’ve spent so much time in Elbonia whilst I could have started a living in The West so much earlier.

It takes time but with age things starts looking different. We have highs and lows, it doesn’t really matter from the perspective.

It made me think about this thread. Take whatever you can from it:

J.P. Morgan strategist Marko Kolanovic is hanging up his spikes.
Kolanovic, who gained a media following and notoriety for having a PhD. in theoretical physics, has struggled with broad U.S. equity market calls over the past couple years.
Citing an internal memo, Bloomberg reports that Kolanovic is leaving his position as chief global market strategist at JPM to explore other opportunities.
Kolanovic was consistently bullish on U.S. equities for much of 2022, a year in which the benchmark S&P 500 slumped nearly 20%. He turned bearish as the market bottomed and has remained firmly so even as the S&P rebounded almost 25% in 2023 and advanced more than 14% in H1 2024. As recently as Friday, Kolanovic backed his ultra-bearish year-end target of 4,200 points for the S&P.

2 Likes

50% chance of it happening

Completely OT: this made me look up for the first time in 5+ years the actual value of the SP500 and holy cow is 5500, I remember my early days of investing in 2014 when there was this trepidation for the SP500 to go over 2000, and I was tracking it impatiently.

I realize now I have stopped looking at the actual value for so long, since I look at my total once per month for a manual editing of my sheet, and not even at my ETF, I completely lost any relation to indexes values.

3 Likes

I do hope I will reach this level of zen in 10 years or something.

2 Likes

Then do it!
I’ve never got passion from work, as I was always driven by my own introverted curiosity that is not widely shared with others. PhD gets other people accept your extravagance / strangeness if you don’t pursue further academic carrier, where everyone has a PhD and it’s a kind of junior entry level. PhD does not generally give you an advantage in salary, management/communication/extraversion/networking are rewarded much better, but it gives you a more luxurious work. As they say there are work horses and parade horses.