Why You Should Finish Your PhD

I just read a really good, no-nonsense article on the interweb telling me why I should finish and write up my PhD. 

The reasons that resonated most were that:

• You won't *ever* finish until you have done your viva.  Ever, it will always hang over you for EVER.
• You will fuck up your supervisor's record.
• You may have to keep paying Uni every year for 'writing up' status for yonks.
• You will have make it hard for your supervisor to write your reference - if you finish they can just go on and on about how brilliant you are, if you don't they will have to try and gloss over the fact you never had the gumption to finish.

There are other, obvious reasons but we know all those (self satisfaction, contribution to knowledge bla bla) but they weren't sufficient to motivate me any more.

However, just seeing that I would be a bugger to my sup and would really bugger up my future references etc made me think that really, now, this is an exercise in communication and nothing else.  Who cares if I got the chapter wrong, my sup has marked it and is sending it to me in the post and I will just have to suck up my pride, make the necessary corrections, put aside my intellectual idiocy and snobbery and self-aggrandisement and just write it as I should, jump through the hoops, hand it in and Move the Fuck On.

Pride and idiocy cannot stop me doing this.  So what if I am not as clever as I thought?  So what if I haven't got this all sewn up?  So what if (I think) my Sup thinks I must be as thick as anything?  Just write, and get on and go on holiday and get a kitten.

If I don't finish I won't have much pride left either. 

x J