Vision for steady state

Once upon a time, in my life, I had a chance to declare that I am retired and free to do anything. That is when I decided that I wanted to do biological research. Of course, doing a Ph.D. in biology was the most logical way of doing it.

In the meantime, my fortunes changed and I was no longer retired. Nonetheless, I knew the path I wanted to take, so I became a full time researcher, in spite of not having the financial luxury.

Today, I do not have a Ph.D. In fact, the degree stopped being important a while ago. I started viewing getting a degree a big hassle, considering the amount of slavery you have to put it. Yet, given financial independence, I will still choose doing research.

So, only recently, it started dawning on me that what I wanted was NOT a Ph.D. but "something to do with biological reserach". What I enjoyed about doing research - I wanted to retain. What I didn't like, I wanted to leave.

So, what do I like about doing research?

1. Given a choice between exploring a brand new system and a well-studied system, I will pick a well-studied system. For instance, I will pick up cancer or immunology over a brand new question like finding the tickle gene.

2. I like to study a system as opposed to going wherever a gene takes you - for instance, I will rather study the tickling system rather than study a "tick gene", and all the non-tickling pleiotropic effect that tick gene has.

3. I like to read a lot of literature and come up with testable hypotheses - well designed experiments that in the light of my hypothesis, seem simple to carry out and makes one wonder why they were never done in the first place. Such experiments, ideally, could have been carried out 5 years ago. These experiments distinguish between two possibilities - and yield a good result either way the experiment goes.

4. I like to do something in the lab - such as routine fly work or molecular biology or whatever. I do not like the pressure. I would rather learn one technique and do it really well, day after day, instead of just learning a million things poorly and trying to do them all.

5. I like to discuss ideas, both evaluating someone else's idea for consistency and submitting mine for the same check. So, in other words, I like authoring papers and reviewing them. I like writing grants and reviewing them.

THINGS I DO NOT LIKE ABOUT RESEARCH

1. I do not like that you have to Beg. I do not like writing grants with the aim of begging for money. So, I can help someone else with grant-writing, but I do not like grant-writing as a way of earning a living. I mean, if I were creating a tangible product such as an incubator, then its utility is clearly obvious to everyone, but a research on fruitfly's sleep wake cycle really doesn't seem to be worth millions of dollars to me.

2. I do not like spending 8-12 hrs a day on biological research - it seems too much. Life has other promising things that I would like to enjoy and it seemed to me that I had missed on a lot of things. I can spend, if necessary, at most 4 hrs a day, occasionally ...

3. I do not like the fact that in biology research, you have to do politics. It seems downright dirty to me. Ass-kissing, exchanging favors, etc. are beyond me. I like to be upfront about the value I am bringing to the table and the exchange of values needs to be fair, as agreed explicitly by all the parties.

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Based on all this analysis, I am inclined towards creating a resource exclusively for postdocs and grad students in the field of circadian rhythms that makes their lives easier. I will call it circadianbase - it will contain information about software and tutorials on how to use them; it will have a general overview of circadian rhythms and detailed discussion about every single aspect of rhythms, so that it is the latest review on the topic.

My ideal life would be to wake up in the morning ,spend 2 hours reading literature on circadian rhythms, then posting something on circadianbase and attending to various comments, emails, posts on circadianbase. I would lead my rest of the day any way I please (may be playing chess, volunteering in a rhythm lab for a few hours, etc.) and at the end of the day, I would go back to circadianbase and respond to various messages.

So, how am I making money? I will NOT be actively earning money. I would have retired and making steady income from my investments. I may be taking up odd software jobs to help people or causes that I care about. But, essentially, all my work would be for my pleasure.

So, in steady state, we will be having our own home and I will have a personal income of $4000 per month from investments - by the way of rents, interests etc.

This is the first time in my life that I have had such a clear vision of what I want my retired life to be. The funny thing is, if I have a software job in los angeles and work for 8 hrs doing it, then I am actually very close to achieving my "retired life" version right now, except that i would be working my ass off while doing software job. So, for the next few years, I will be working as a software engineer to make money. That much is clear to me now.

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