people used to ask in undergrad,

AP Calculus wasn't that bad, why does math have such a reputation?

i'd tell them about the ice cream.

imagine you're a kid. you like ice cream. it's one of the simplest purest joys you have access to, and nothing makes you happier.

you get to undergrad and decide your future is probably in ice cream, and you binge entire tubs of all the main flavors, you have that miraculous moment where you try sweet cream after a lifetime of assuming vanilla was background, it's delightful. you haven't really paid attention to the warning signs -- normal people do not consume entire tubs in a sitting -- but you brush it off as culture. "for those who truly love ice cream, the rules are different."

then you get to grad school and you're trapped in a walk-in freezer that locks on the inside. no one told you it does that. they just assumed that in an environment where people are born in the ice cream, surrounded by it, molded by it, being locked in that walk-in can only do you good. "now he can focus, see?"

meanwhile your peers are telling horror stories of omelas-tier exotic ice chambers at pressures that would kill archea, where the pros go in and don't come out until they've found what they needed to find. sweatshops where people eat nothing but straight vanilla until the flavor stops being a flavor. toppings that give you immense existential hangovers about what ice cream even is at its core -- yes romanesco florets are appropriate for quadruple fudge, what else would we even use? expeditions where the flavor comes back and no one actually knows the taste of it firsthand for decades.

years later. you have tenure at Haagen Dazs. you watch a cheerful little kid look at you with pure wonder and awe, and he tells you, "someday, i'm going to be just like you! i LOVE ice cream!"

sure you do. we all did.