where am i going with this?

In the past months, several of my close friends have declared a willingness and interest in going back to school. Perhaps it's part of our profession. We are information-oriented and therefore "lifelong learners" of the worst kind. Perhaps this desire reflects a dissatisfaction with our jobs, the organization we work for, ourselves, our status or our paychecks. I've felt the same draw to the academy myself but have resisted, in part because I am not yet willing to add to my large student loan debt, in part because I do like my job and exhausting myself working 40 hours a week and going to school at the same time doesn't appeal to me.

I also made a promise to myself when I dropped out of my first phd program that I would never go back without a project firmly in mind. For much of grad school I wandered around, bumping into good ideas and good people almost by accident, completing my first degree and the first year of my attempted second degree in a mist created by my lack of understanding of How Academia Really Works. By the end of that first year I had watched my advisor killing himself working toward tenure and a few of my classmates drop out, kill themselves (literally, this time), get divorced and generally become miserable.

You can see why I might hesitate to start that all over again. And yet, I've always wanted to have a plethora of degrees, especially the one that would allow me to call myself "dr. so and so" without having to stick people with needles or cut them up. So, I'm thinking about it, just like all of my friends.