My journey into academia began at a Vipassana meditation retreat in Thailand, where a newfound fascination with the human mind merged with a pre-existing interest in science, and I resolved to try and understand consciousness from all angles – through philosophy, meditation, psychology and neuroscience. I returned home to complete an undergraduate degree (psychology) with honours in cognitive neuroscience (plus a prize or two to boot) and then embarked on a PhD exploring the neural mechanisms of conscious awareness. My studies were going well until about halfway through the PhD, when I attempted to publish my first paper and was met with a highly inefficient scholarly publishing system that wastes time and resources, biases the literature and pressures researchers into compromising their integrity. The more I looked into the state of academia, the more dismayed I became, with employment prospects for researchers being far worse than I had ever imagined. This shock threw me into a state of disillusionment – if I carried down this path, would I be forced to compromise my scientific integrity to survive in academia? Did I really want to compete with friends and colleagues for too few jobs? Was the system even capable of supporting me as I explored these esoteric but (in my opinion) important questions? Everywhere I looked, I saw evidence of overworked and burned-out postdocs, many of whom had decided to leave academia after years of chasing short-term contracts around the world.