I am sure you could do a lot worse than being synthetic chemist (but right now I can’t think of any examples).

wait, actually I can think of one example: in biology, people do eight-year-long postdocs, with one advisor, and are forever bound to their former advisors research subject even when they start their own group. They are expected to continue the work in the same sub-sub-field as their former mentor when they are applying for the tenure-track positions.

Being a prima donna is a choice. It would behoove us to endeavor to be better individuals and better chemists. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Go make some tetrakis, sniff some ether, cheer the fuck up and hie thee to the world of materials chem if synthesis is that bad. It’s nice here. We get lots and lots of data to inspire us to beat our heads against the wall

Kip Thorne gives a fantastic talk, incidentally–I was lucky enough to see him speak back home when I was in high school.

Shame on you for using the term “Bipolar” so flippantly. It is a serious neurological consition that deserves understanding.

Kip Thorne’s book is superb. Also check out Leonard Sussind’s “The Black Hole War”

Susskind

Synthesis is life, all else is waiting. There is no blackboard so empty (whiteboards are bullshit) that a good organiker cannot decorate it too good to erase. Tomorrow we will do it again.

Grant funding is proactive in destroying young faculty who think the wrong thoughts. All discovery is insubordination to authority. We want NASA not Google, engineers not scientists, process not product. Physics has string theory and the Standard Model – theory so elegantly derived and pure of spirit that empirical flasification is heresy. Synthesis is the venue of idiots who discard waste rather than publish it.

The human body does not one thing that is not determined by some receptor system. These biomolecular communities intercept signals from the outside world and collate them into messages which percolate up from our unconscious. The photoreceptors extant in some way at the back of our knees regulate circadian tides of neurotransmitters; pheromones evaporate from a brunette’s armpits; the soft stroke of a hand at our back as we sleep is like oil upon the watery crests of EEG tracings emanating from so far down in the brain stem that we could never waking have any influence over their angry peaks.
So it was not a surprise that even the leathery-souled Geiger strode into the building that fine bright spring morning whistling a tune whose lyrics included no references to death, depression, or failed love. He tripped lightly down the gleaming tile hallway and tossed open the door to the lab without remembering to flip his usual ritual bird in the direction of Shaftner’s office. The lab was ablaze from the sun. The amber bottles of solvent on the top of his shelves reflected red and orange and prismed bright hues of apricot across his desk. The round-bottomed and Erlenmeyer flasks he had washed the night before and hung from white plastic fingers over the sink glowed, serving as deformed fisheye mirrors showing twenty and more miniature happy Geigers opening the freezer.
From an iced-over metal tin he removed a thin glass tube capped with a tiny red hat. There was about an inch of a clear liquid in the tube, and he held it up to the light and nodded with a laugh. For here was the source of his cheer: two milligrams of a simple tetrahydrofuran derivative, its core a pentagon ring of five atoms – four carbon and one oxygen. Though it was substituted in three positions, though the second carbon bore the exotic selenium, it was still unremarkable. Geiger, grizzled in spirit but with only four years of daily organic synthesis, had no obvious reason to take such pleasure in its construction. But he did, for this tetrahydrofuran was a model study, a proof of method. DESPIRIMIDE, the fading structure hovering over his desk like a tombstone, contained just such a tetrahydrofuran. The all-cis stereochemistry of the substituents in the DESPIRIMIDE ring – the three appendages to the ring all pointing up so they were on the same side of the plane of the ring – was not easily formed. Geiger had, he was convinced, thought up a new way to construct the necessary arrangement. That would have been accomplishment enough, but he believed that he had also been able to cleverly place the selenium so that it could later be used to attach the tetrahydrofuran ring onto the rest of the required rings.
He believed. He had so far only circumstantial evidence gathered from one silica gel thin-layer chromatogram. He knew that the spot which corresponded to the starting material was no longer present in the reaction products, which on the plate were three very different species. One was unmoved from where he had applied the spot, at the origin, and was probably some salt, polar, unwilling to move with the hexane and ethyl acetate running up the plate. Another spot appeared all the way up the plate, right at the line he had penciled on to mark the farthest advance of the developing solvent. This one was no doubt an oxide of tributyltin, the final form of one of the reagents in the reaction mixture, tri-n-butyltin hydride. But the most beautiful spot was the one in the middle of the plate, just above where the starting material would appear if present. This was the largest spot when viewed under ultraviolet light, and when Geiger put the dry plate into a glass chamber containing iodine crystals, the spot rapidly darkened to a deep violet as it complexed the iodine vapor. Both were manifestations he expected from the compound due to the selenium atom. He had no reason to expect the reaction to have proceeded so well, and he was trying to stay calm, to put down the vile hubris rising in him, the worst sort of jinx, a cosmic beacon that the sadistic yet befuddled being which was the god of chemistry might not ignore. So at three in the morning he had calmly taken the whole of the reaction up into hexane and washed out the water-soluble byproducts by shaking with brine, then dried the hexane over anhydrous magnesium sulfate, filtered it, concentrated it, dissolved the gummy residue in deuterated chloroform, filtered it into an NMR tube, and – just like he could care less than nothing what it were – gone home. That was to throw the god/demon/sprite/gremlin off the track.
Then he walked the three blocks to his apartment and slept like a stone buried deep in the quiet earth, and when the summer sun rose incandescent over the Fenway, he leapt from his futon and rushed to his curtainless bedroom window. A flex of his biceps and it was up – his head poking out like Scrooge on Christmas morning, looking for the lad to send round for a goose. Joy!
So in that mood he proceeded down the hall and turned to fly down the stairs to the basement room in which waited the Varian, Judge of Protons. The Judge would tell him what he needed to know by examination of the hydrogens in his – his! – furan. And, Geiger told himself with such breathlessness as a thought could possibly be, it did not even matter if he had not made the exact molecule he hoped for. It did not matter even if he had made something else, something which could not possibly serve as a foundation for building his despirimide. Because whatever he had done, he was sure it was a reaction not described in the literature, leading if not to the furan, then to some very similar class of compounds which may be structurally integral to another natural product, anti-cancer agent, killer of AIDS, headache powder, whatever. It really didn’t matter. As long as he could knock out a dozen or so related compounds, he could publish the method, first in Tetrahedron Letters as a short communication, then in the Journal of Organic Chemistry as a longer paper. Then he would find a natural product built around his – his! – furan (or whatever it was) and make it using the Geiger conditions. No – the Geiger reagent. The Geiger reaction. Or he would build just enough of the natural product to show that you could make it using the Geiger reaction if you cared to fuss with the details, which he would not. He would be off to other, more important matters, leaving the Shaftners of the organic chemistry world, the second-raters, the small-minded noncreative grinders who squeaked through their careers by the grace of drips and drabs of grant money tossed down to them solely to paint the fine, almost irrelevant, details upon the mighty edifices constructed by the real creators of the world, the rare minds who brought forth gems like the Geiger reaction.
On the second flight of steps, the ones leading to the basement, he saw the unmistakable back of Geoffrey Stumm, but not even the awful visage he knew was on the other side could dampen his smoldering pride and expectation. He quickened his pace and passed Stumm, holding his breath involuntarily the same way a full bus from the elementary school goes unnaturally silent on the road past the cemetery. Stumm did not react or offer a greeting. Geiger did not look back. The Judge was waiting.
Geiger’s touchstone, the Varian 90 Megahertz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrophotometer, had its own home in the topmost basement level. It required a room which remained at a constant, cool temperature and was situated in such a location that vibrations were minimized. It needed these conditions because the measurements that Geiger – and the other graduate students and faculty who were preparing and analyzing organic chemicals – required of it were it were much like magic. If a needle is one millimeter thick, then the haystack the Varian searched for that needle was one thousand meters high. That was a quantitative analogy. The qualitative, intuitive one was that NMR was fucking magic. You put a compound into solution in a little tube, dropped it into a magnet, and obtained the structure. Intermediate in the sequence were the mysteries of nuclear spin, the puzzle-solving fuzzy logic of the human brain, and the improbable transform of Fourier.
Geiger opened the door and instantly sensed something was very wrong. The bright sour-blue tinge of the fluorescent lights and the three-note-chord murmuring hum of the basement were unchanged, but there was an audible and tactile gap where once had been a soft rush of cool wind from the air conditioning vent.
The room had been emptied. No chairs, no metal desk, no stepstool. No magnet, no console. No NMR. There was only a 8½ by 11 note taped on the wall, printed:

TO ALL NMR USERS,
Abel Movers is moving the NMR to the new building.
N. D’Arcy, Chairman

Your bipolar-maniac extremes indicate you are a hyper-obsessive risk taker. You will likely lose all your money should you ever visit Vegas.

A classic symptom of your affliction is the ability to screen out reality, despite overwhelming evidence that a line of thought will lead you nowhere.

You’re gambling with time, which most people only have so much of.
The Academic system is draining you of almost all your vital years. They know you will ignore your condition and situation until it’s too late. In the end they will own a large part of your life, and thus your soul.

But it’s healthy you realize you’re on a road to nowhere.