A rewarding and interesting way to live your life, but once you get into your 30s, this gets old. Difficult to pay the bills in this way, and to start a family? Forget it. This is a good way to sleepwalk one's way through adult life, avoiding most important responsibilities and reneging on the essential purpose of life: to be productive in a palpable sense. Three stars because the pursuit of knowledge and the continuance of scholarly traditions is a noble thing, but if you're into that, you're being an intellectual phony if you don't graduate yourself up to the teacher/professor level.