Physics: The Cult You Join Willingly
You come in wide-eyed, quoting Feynman, dreaming of unraveling the secrets of the universe. Five years later you’re just hoping your simulation doesn’t crash overnight— because if it does, so will you.
They say physics is beautiful. And it is— like a glacier collapsing in slow motion.
My week? It’s me, in the lab at 2 a.m., arguing with a bug I caused six months ago in a code I no longer understand, modeling a system I barely believe in.
My advisor says, “Be patient, this is how real science works, blah blah blah!!!” But honestly, it feels less like science and more like I’m part of a very long, very expensive existential joke. And the punchline? Me, trying to explain to a committee why a graph with no trend is somehow “publishable.”
Physics is the only field where you can spend four years deriving a result that literally says: “Under these approximations, reality doesn’t matter.”
You know what the real “black hole” is? My inbox.
And quantum mechanics? It’s not weird or magical anymore. It’s just another gaslight. Like, oh—your wavefunction collapses? Cool, so did my mental health.
Every time I submit an abstract, I die a little. Not because I fear rejection, but because I hope for it. Just so I won’t have to present again.
Sometimes I fantasize about leaving— getting a normal job, maybe even smiling again. But then I remember: I’ve spent seven years learning to speak exclusively in tensor indices and self-doubt. I'm unemployable in the real world.
People ask, “So what will you do after the PhD?” I don’t know. Probably haunt the physics department, roaming the hallways whispering, “Did you normalize the wavefunction?”
But here’s the sick part— the truly twisted part— Even after all this... I still love it. Because somewhere beneath the burnout, beneath the cynicism and the caffeine shakes, there’s still that child who looked up at the stars and asked, Why?
And physics? It never answered. But it taught me how to keep asking, even as everything else fell apart. :)
