Hello I dont want to sound like JP Sartre but if there is something that you can not change then you can try to accept it as a kind of FACT and try to change your attitude to that fact.

That sounds so abstract. I 'd better give an example. When I did my first PhD back in 2003 or thereabouts I used to find myself awake at 0330 hrs working on something no-one else in Europe gave a damn about. It started to get me down. The isolation. The over=specialism. The feeling of being lost in the desert of your own neurological perversities. Then I turned a corner by thinking of all the same things in terms of UNIQUENESS rather than privation and lack. I don't know what you are studying, but it might help to say a kind of secular academic prayer when you get lonesome about it:

'I alone among the living can do this. If I do not do it, it will remain undone forever.'

I dont know if it will help you , but it worked for me as a mantra.

It doesn't stop the lonliness, but it transforms it into a more positive fact. You are a unique lever in the machinery of human knowledge. If everyone were doing what you were doing, it wouldn't be a PhD.

I wish I could help more, but that's about it. Creativity is a lonesome path, but I still wish you happy trails.

Mark.

This is a VERY tricky question my friends, and the answer hinges on what can be variously read as:

Intellectual propriety and due defference to intellectual leaders or

Territorial pissings and which baboon has the biggest reddest ass.

I am close to the end of my second PhD and loving it. It is in an entirey different subject than the first one, and I am passionate about it. It is not costing me a fortune. There are people with mild to moderate drug habits (cigarettes, amphetamines, alcohol) who spend much more in year on harming and entertaining themselves. Funded or not, study what you think is important to the highest level you possibly can! This is worth saying again. If you really think something is important, study it to the highest level you possibly can! If you only think somthing is halfway important you should have ditched it as an undergrad.

The formulation 'overqualified, especially in the real world' is a very odd thing. Is there an unreal world? In which the underqualified count for more? Where disqualifications like not being able to write properly somehow make one epmpolyable? Sadly, these are not entirely rhetorical questions. There are indeed many jobs for which the capacity for independent thinking makes one a ruinous bad example.....

Forget the job end of the deal. If you want to do a second big romance, and can get away with it , go for it !

I dont want to sound like one of the 'Stalinists' but the time limit is a (mainly) good idea. How current is the contribution to knowledge if the PhD was started in 2006 and has been limping forwards at the rate of half a chapter every summer since then? When I was working on my first PhD in the early 00's there were more than a few British academics who had been 'working on their PhD's' for years and years - it was an excuse to get research leave I think, because a lot of them never completed. Time limits are good for keeping the material fresh and most important of all they stop you from losing momentum. Losing momentum is the real killer in my experience: if you put a big research project 'on the back burner' it takes huge effort to get it moving properly again. Moral of the story? Like the Replicants from 'Blade Runner', work on the assumption that you have a very limited lifespan!