is only partially in your control, because it is created both by your choices, as well as by circumstances beyond you.

My argument is that fulfillment stems from aligning your career path with your personal values, and that a great deal of unhappiness comes from a mismatch in the way you are evaluated versus the way you see yourself generating value in the world. Naturally, I can’t tell you what your values are, or what choices you should make– but I hope to provide a way of thinking about choices: a framework for making decisions and prioritizing what you do that you can apply to your own life, if and where applicable.

First, a short story: when I was in my first postdoc at Berkeley, I went to a colloquium given by Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology. He began the talk by telling us that he was really enjoying his visit, that we all seemed really bright, and then he essentially told us that most of us would no longer be astronomers in a few years. He ran through the numbers of how many grads and postdocs were in the department, how many tenure track faculty jobs there 