I wonder what it is exactly that makes the same exact thing appealing wearing one outfit versus the other.

I feel like if we can solve that, we can restore some kind of respect for and desire for "academia", which seems like it's very much fallen out of vogue in culture lately.

I spent some time at Harvard as an undergrad doing research there though, and it was the most intellectually stimulating environment I've ever been in. Maybe YC is similar, but it's a lot about money in those environments and most startups aren't that interesting either.

But really, I can buy the library access at my alma mater for a trivial sum. And, were I in the city, I could access a ton of the other stuff too. No, not the labs for the fields that require them for the most part--or generally discussion seminars, but there's a lot you can access for free-ish if you work at it.

I recall that hitting on undergraduates as an early 20-something graduate student was considered a pretty serious no-no, and barring some tenured professors that feel they're above the rules, it certainly seemed like consequences both socially and formally probably increased the older and further up the chain you got (as they should). It's honestly pretty creepy to talk about them like you do.

Even at what was probably one of absolute best institutions in the world for accelerator physics, which I was interested in, I recall very early on being told by some faculty member that maybe 1 in 10 of us would ever land a tenure track faculty job. Almost everyone I have kept up with that wound up at the best graduate institutions for physics in the world have left, and are all basically doing the same shit I am (doing meaningless shit with computers), almost all of them worse for the wear, especially those who are now leaving after a postdoc or two.

I still have easy access to the local state university's library in its entirety, that is useful, but you don't need an academic job for that. I met plenty of other physics and math graduate school/postdoc drop outs in industry, you can't go far in our field without running into a lot of them everywhere, and most of plenty happy to talk about academic stuff. I don't have the same sort of access to faculty and expensive physics equipment that I did in the past, but given that I was able to actually buy my own home in my 20s with no help, support my own family and not generally have to worry about money and my own future in the same way that almost all of my peers still in academia did and still do, I can't fathom why outside of the absolute most brilliant focused 1 in 100 million minds would bother taking the risk of beating their head against the academic treadmill unless you were already very wealthy. Any justification just feels like massive amounts of cope for not wanting to leave the academic nest.

If you're a 24 year old grad student and they're a 22 year old undergraduate in a different department? No big age gap, no power over them like grading their work, no problem.

And as you get towards 27 obviously you won't want to date 18 year olds - but even if the grad students in your department are mostly male and you don't want to create an awkward environment for the female minority, there are grad students in plenty of other departments too.

Is meeting your future wife in grad school super-professional? IDK, maybe not? But it's relatively a lot more professional than trying the same thing at a sausagefest Silicon Valley tech company.

How you move socially is going to be one of the biggest factors that can kill opportunities for you or spin you out of academic work entirely. Everyone is out for themselves -- knives out.

As such, you're probably living very dangerously trying to navigate intimate relationships anywhere in the orbit of campus. Sure, it happens, but doesn't always end well.