I know a guy with a PhD in medieval agriculture with a specific focus on cows. He’s one of my brothers wife’s friends.

This guy devoted his life to ye olde english cow farts.

He’s struggling for employment as one might expect.

Frustrating to say the least. I feel my PhD accelerated learning in all directions. Not from the program content itself, but the skills involved in the ingestion of high volumes of dense information. This idea that the borders of my world don’t extend past some yadda yadda about some tiny subclass of a field is some silly goosery.

Can those “skills involved” be learned elsewhere? Sure, this is just the path I took. Can phDoctors be single minded or general idiots? Sure, I’m an idiot. Do we need some single minded people? Sure, amazing things can be accomplished by singular focus.

But it isn’t a mandatory condition or experience of a floppy hat assed (sword in some countries) recipient of this degree.