Somewhere along the way “how are you?” stopped being the first thing people ask me. It has been replaced by a new opening line: “So are you doing your PhD next?”

It usually comes before I have put my bag down. It comes from lecturers in corridors, relatives at family gatherings and even classmates. Sometimes it comes from people I have met only twice. The question is almost never asked with malice. It is asked warmly and with a kind of pride, as though the answer is obvious and I have simply not announced it yet.

The follow-up arrives right behind it: “And where? Here at home in Stellenbosch or overseas?” Europe or the US. Say the right answer and everyone nods. Hesitate and you can feel the room recalculate what it thinks of you.

I want to be honest about why these questions tire me out. It is not that I do not want to answer them. It is that the answer is not a quick one and almost nobody asking wants the slow version.

I went from undergrad straight into honours and from honours straight into a masters. There was no gap year and no stretch of working in the world to find out who I was outside a lecture hall. I do not regret that. But it means I have spent years inside the same machine, and the machine is now offering me three or four more years of the same thing. That is the part people skip over when they ask so casually. A PhD is not a next step in the way honours was a next step. It is a decision about a large portion of your twenties and about where you will live and who you will be near. It is also a decision about how much of your mind you are willing to hand over to a single question.

And it does take your mind. People who have not done one tend to picture a PhD as a masters with a longer reading list. Those who have done one describe something else: years of working alone on a problem that nobody has fully solved, with no guarantee that your answer will matter. The mental fatigue is not a side effect of the degree. It is the degree. I already feel the early version of it now, in the weeks when the data refuses to cooperate and I wonder how much more of myself I have to give. Multiply that by three years and then by the pressure of doing it well.

So when someone tells me to “just do it” I want to ask whether they understand what they are asking.

Sometimes I think they do not. Sometimes I think they understand perfectly and are asking anyway because of what they hope I will become. This is the part I find hardest to say out loud. Many of the people pushing me toward a PhD are people I respect and who have invested in me. They have seen something in my work and they want to see it carried further. I am grateful for that. But there is a quiet difference between being encouraged and being steered. Encouragement says “I think you could do this; what do you want?” Steering says “this is what someone like you does next.” The first leaves room for my answer. The second only leaves room for my compliance.

I have watched this play out with other students. A promising masters student gets told early and often that the PhD is their destiny. Nobody asks what they want their life to look like at thirty. Nobody asks whether they want academia at all or are simply tired and afraid of what comes after the structure of a degree ends. The expectation hardens into a script. By the time the student realises they never chose it the application deadlines are already close. Pushing a student toward a path because it fits your picture of them is not mentorship. It is a way of mistaking your hopes for their wishes.

Then there is the question of where. People speak about it as if it were a ranking exercise. Stay and you are comfortable and local and perhaps a little unambitious. Go abroad and you are bold and global and taking the brave road. I do not think it is that simple, and I resent how quickly the choice gets moralised.

Staying has real weight. My research is about South African schooling and the inequalities that follow students into university. The data and the context sit here. So do the people whose experiences I am trying to understand. A PhD at home would keep me close to the questions I care about and close to the communities that shaped them. It would also keep me near family. It would spare me the cost of starting over in a new country with new systems and new loneliness.

But leaving has real weight too. A different institution means different methods and different colleagues who think about problems in ways I have not yet learned. It means being stretched by people who do not already know me. It also means funding and visas and distance. It means building a life somewhere that was not designed with someone like me in mind. And I know what that does to the silence I wrote about in my last post. I would be the youngest in a room again. Only this time the room would be in a country where I am a foreigner as well.

Neither choice is the safe one and neither is the brave one. Each is a trade between things I value and I am still working out which ones I value most.

What I have learned is that I do not owe anyone an answer on their timeline. I can say “I am thinking about it” and mean it fully. I can say “I do not know yet” without it being a failure of ambition. The people who love me will survive my uncertainty. The ones who cannot are probably asking for themselves and not for me.

If you are standing at the same fork and getting the same questions I want you to know something. You are allowed to treat this as the large decision it is. You are allowed to ask for time and to want a life that is bigger than a degree. And you are allowed to answer “how are you?” before you answer “what next?”

Because honestly I would love to be asked how I am. Some days the true answer is tired. Some days it is hopeful. And on the good days it is simply curious about what comes next and grateful to be the one choosing it.