Being an individual differences researcher is a thankless job.

We get slammed from our colleagues (reviewers), we get slammed from the public (no one wants to hear that individual differences exist). We’re overworked (finding the right structural equation model takes eons), underpaid(compared to authors who write about how anyone can be anything, anytime), underappreciated (it’s nearly impossible to get a tenure track position as an individual differences researcher), and largely ignored (the amount of people who will ever read a paper in the journal Intelligence or Personality and Individual Differences is less than .000000001% of the general population, and that’s an upper range estimate). 

So why do I do it? Why should anyone do it? Some days I do wonder. But then, I remember how good it feels to discover something true. What I lose in so many ways, I gain tenfold by the feeling that I have witnessed some secret of the universe; I have received privilege access to the beautiful variation that must exist in order for us to continue as a species and the diversity that must coexist to make this world a better place.