Should I go to Graduate School?

If I went to graduate school, I would go to get a PhD in pure mathematics.  I have been contemplating lately whether to go.  Here are the pros and cons, with counterarguments.  I could also have given counterarguments to the counterarguments, but I decided to stop at just counterarguments.

First the cons:

1. If I went to graduate school, I would be removing myself from the real world for a few years of my life.  I have a sense of urgency about the political situation and I feel irresponsible cloistering myself away and just doing math all day for years while people are suffering and the environment is quickly being destroyed.
   1. Counterargument:  I’m not really politically active right now anyway.  Why do I think I would be politically active if I wasn’t in graduate school?
   2. Counterargument:  I wouldn’t necessarily be doing math all day if I went to graduate school; I could do other things too with my time.  I would just be doing math with most of my time.
   3. Counterargument:  Perhaps my sense of urgency is exaggerated.  I have my whole life to be political, and there are some ways of being political that academic credentials really help with (e.g. Noam Chomsky, David Graeber).
2. I have a problem communicating with people, and one of the reasons for this is my immersion in mathematics.  For example, I often put form over content — I will often critique the form of what someone says and leave the content alone, and people will often reply to the content of what I’m saying when really the form is the important part.  Years more of immersion in mathematics would exacerbate my communication problem.
   1. Counterargument:  Maybe my communication problem is not due to mathematics.
3. I generally have a problem with school.  I don’t like being forced to do things, and even if I like something I am forced to do in school, I don’t have time to do it in the face of all the other things I am simultaneously being forced to do.  Each semester of college, I had a really bad time but I blamed myself rather than Stony Brook and I thought that the next semester would be better — I was consistently wrong.  Why would I not be making this same mistake again by going to graduate school?  I also anticipate that I will also be uncomfortably limited in my choice of thesis topic.
   1. Counterargument:  This is really only a problem for the first year of graduate school.  After that, I will pretty much be able to focus on a single topic that I choose and go deeply into it.
   2. Counterargument:  By doing enough research beforehand, I can choose a graduate school and advisor that will let me write about what I want to write about.
   3. Counterargument:  It is arguable that Stony Brook wasn’t a good fit and I would have been happier if I had transferred to some other college.  So maybe the problem was just Stony Brook and not college in general.
   4. Counterargument:  Graduate school would be an entirely different thing than college; maybe my problem is just with college and not with school in general.

Now the pros:

1. I will be able to find people who I can relate to mathematically.  Mathematics is a big part of my identity and it is hard to find people who can relate to this part of me.  I wouldn’t get along with everybody in graduate school, but I would have much better luck among them than among the general population.
   1. Counterargument:  I could find people to relate to among the general population.  Though it would take more work to find such people, my perspective would be broadened through them because they wouldn’t think in the narrow mathematical way.
   2. Counterargument:  I could find people to relate to in anything I do, not just graduate school.  It doesn’t matter if they are math people, the important thing is that I am around them a lot and get to know them in the context of a years-long shared experience.
2. I have found that I am happiest when I am immersed in something involving other people.  Graduate school would be a deep immersion in mathematics, which I love deeply.  I technically could become immersed in mathematics without being in graduate school, but it would not be socially acceptable, i.e. I wouldn’t get a stipend and my parents and potential employers wouldn’t approve as much — so it would be way harder.  The difficulty of this would be distracting and diminish the immersion.
   1. Counterargument:  I could be deeply immersed in something involving other people other than mathematics in graduate school.  (Not sure what.)
   2. Counterargument:  Happiness is not the most important thing.
3. I need to be part of a higher purpose — a project with other people to do something.  Unfortunately the people with good work-ethic are mostly situated in the well-established ones, and all the well-established ones are evil.  Because of this I have lately been trying to contribute to projects that are not well-established.  For these projects there is no existing reservoir of commitment and work-ethic, so I need to come up with it myself, and this is really difficult.  I have been feeling lately like I don’t have the energy to come with with all this work-ethic myself.  Perhaps doing something less good just to be doing something at all is a valid option.  Moreover, I would not have to be evil myself just because I was part of an evil institution.  I could use the resources of of the institution for my own ends.  I probably couldn’t be fully good, but I would certainly be less evil than the institution.
   1. Counterargument:  Don’t be evil!
   2. Counterargument:  There is a third option that Momo brought up.  I could work on a project just by myself, or with just 2 or 3 people.  It would be easier to summon the requisite work-ethic that way, because there would be less people to coordinate.  In a sense I am already doing this with this very blog, as well as with my website socialmath.github.io.  This is nice, but doing a project with a whole bunch of other people would be even nicer.
   3. Proargument:  I seem to want to be pure and not let any evil inside myself.  This is stupid.  Most people don’t even have the privilege to be that pure.  Since the oppression of others is facilitating my purity, it really isn’t that pure at all.  My desire for purity really comes from white guilt and not from genuine goodness.  I should sacrifice my purity to be more good.  As Miles quoted from some anime, “is it better to remain pure from evil or to take evil into yourself in order to purge it form the world?”
4. Having a PhD would make things way easier in the future for me, and I would have way more time to be political.
   1. Counterargument:  This would be at the expense of indoctrination.  I would basically be making a bargain with the authorities.  They’ll give me credentials and make my life easier in exchange for me buying into a lot of academia bullshit and distancing myself from real life.
5. I have a very strong desire to learn mathematics because I love it.  I want to have the society’s knowledge of mathematics under my belt.  I think of myself as a mathematician, and when I learn mathematics I feel like I am learning about myself.  This is an aesthetic end rather than an moral one, but maybe that is ok (cf. this ContraPoints video around 6:15 but watch the whole thing for context).
   1. Counterargument:  Life is the only end in itself and I am unethical and religious if I set up another end in itself, mathematics.  If I want to be aesthetic in my life (as per the ContraPoints video) I should pick something more widely accessible than mathematics.  If only a few people understand a beautiful thing I made, is it really beautiful?  (On the other hand, I could be a mathematics educator like Martin Gardner or betterexplained.com.)
6. It would be really nice to have the option to make money with scholarly work.  To do this I really need credentials, i.e. a PhD.
   1. Counterargument: ??
7. I have found that I like to have a large living space, and I feel trapped and depressed when my living space is small, like an apartment.  I love being at Stony Brook because I feel like the entire campus is my house.  (I’m not saying I like being enrolled in the college, I just like being at the campus.  I’m there right now and I’m not enrolled in any classes.)  I can walk around, bump into people I know, sit down and study, etc.  In Manhattan there is really nowhere that I can sit down and study because there’s music playing in every single establishment (except the Hungarian Pastry Shop, thank you for existing!) and people talking in the libraries.  I am very easily distracted:  I can’t concentrate in the face of meaningful sound, such as music or people talking.  I can concentrate in the Hungarian Pastry Shop because so many people are talking that I can’t make out what anyone is saying, plus there’s the morale boost of having other people around my also studying things.  At Stony Brook, however, I can go to pretty much any building at any hour of the day or night and find a place to study, it’s great.  I’m not sure what places would meet my criteria other than a university campus.  A city doesn’t work, and suburbs wouldn’t really work either.  If I went to graduate school, then I would get to be on a campus.  Similarly if I became a professor at some time in the future.
   1. Counterargument:  Maybe there’s some other place that meets the criteria, such as the secular monastery Jimmy and his friends are thinking about if/when it comes to fruition?  Or if my parents would let me go to Nesin Mathematics Village or if I get independent enough that I don’t need their permission anymore.  Of course these are not mutually exclusive with going to graduate school, and perhaps going to graduate school now would facilitate their occurrence in the future….
   2. Counterargument:  If I had my own apartment and I really made it nice, maybe I could enjoy being there.  I would only need a large campus to run away to if my own apartment was deficient.  My problem with a small living space is that I am densely surrounded by various reminders of myself — it is like being in a room with mirrors on all the walls; and this makes me sink into neurosis.  I might be able to alleviate this effect if I threw out a lot of stuff and organized and decorated really well (perhaps according to the advice of Mari Kondo) —- if I engineered a place that is healthy for me to live.

Please give me advice.  More arguments and counterarguments are welcome.