It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry. That job will pay less than the equivalent job for someone who never took the PhD track.

Of course, the percentage of tenured winners varies a lot by fields. It's very low in the humanities, somewhat better in CS and math, etc.

Once you get tenure, if you ever do, you will indeed have a lot of freedom, but you will also have a lot of work to do. Sure you can pass grading and other jobs off to grad students and postdocs (which you were for the last decade...) but in many fields, the need to fundraise never ends. It's sort of like funding a new startup every year with a different set of grad students.

Most people don't want to sit alone in a closet and think deep thoughts (well, ok, mathematicians do...). But if you want to do something in the real world, you'll need funding, and that means writing a LOT of grant proposals.

> It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry.

There's also a good chunk of people who fail to advance past the assistant professor level, which is pre-tenure at US institutions (not sure about other countries). And it's up or out, so if you're an assistant professor and you don't get tenure within a certain number of years, you lose your job.

> The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry.

…and that’s for the fortunate disciplines, like CS, where there is actually an “industry” to go to. Let’s just say things look rather less pleasant in the humanities.