I think I understand why PhDs say they want to open a bakery or do baking as a hobby

An initially-amusing-but-makes-sense-when-you-think-about-it sentiment that has been mentioned a couple of times on /r/PhD is that one common eventual desire that comes out of doing a PhD is wanting to open a bakery, or take up baking as a hobby.

I can certainly say, 8-9 months in, that hasn’t surfaced for me, so it got me wondering about what aspects of baking and/or operating a bakery wind up being desirable to PhD students, and loosely I can say that in a nutshell, it encompasses all the things not present in PhD work.

Obviously I can only refer to my own experience of doing a PhD work, but I daresay there are similarities of which some people can reasonably empathise with, but nonetheless, my experience so far is that it’s a lot of sitting at a desk, walking around, cognitive effort, and talking/networking with others to combine ideas and produce research.

And one feeling I’ve noticed in myself is wanting to do more non-thinking physical work. I rock up somewhere, someone tells me what to do, or there’s a fixed set of taught and straightforward actions I can do to “just” do the work. Every summer my family used to go blueberry picking, it was the perfect mindless activity to kill a couple of hours doing something that still felt reasonably useful. I also find pleasure in doing housework to satisfy that need.

I suspect baking’s a lot like that. As I know it, baking is an exact science, so for every baking item there’s a clear recipe, a clear set of processes, where if you follow the right recipes you will consistently get the same result. And in the end you produce something that is easily appreciated by the majority of people, as opposed to an academic paper in a niche topic that’ll collect dust in an equally obscure journal (not that all of them necessarily go that way!).

One thing that’s less obvious about a PhD that is probably more noticeable to anyone with industry/administration/corporate experience is that within a PhD you’re doing a bit of everything: planning, orchestrating, communicating, AND the grunt work. Whereas in a large enough company those are usually assigned to designated roles.

So it follows that when one is exerting significant cognitive power and minimal physical power on something a select minority cares about, that the opposite preference would be something requiring minimal cognition and more physical movement to make something that’s more appreciated by a wider audience. And baking very much fills that role.

At least for me, my physical comfort right now is in crochet, housework, occasionally swinging a bokken, and cooking, but I do occasionally wonder if I could put a little more physical energy into something a tad more useful like volunteering at the local op shop. I wouldn’t mind making/supplying/selling frozen dumplings, for example, at least I’d be making a bit of extra coin with my efforts+knowledge!