I'm an incoming physics undergrad starting my first year soon which I'm quite excited for! I've always been inclined towards the theory side of things, hoping to do a PhD focusing on theoretical condensed matter eventually. I've been talking to people and reading discussions over the past few years to better understand how academia is like.

Maybe there's a more nuanced view of this and I'm wrong, but my pessimistic view of academia is that you study so hard for so many years among other sacrifices, just to move from contract to contract with low financial and job security (post-doc positions). While the journal publishers exploit academics and public funds used to fund universities, by getting universities to pay exorbitant amounts for their "services". And everyone has to continually play this game of publish or perish, to progress in their career until they get a faculty position or tenure.

I'm not interested in that lifestyle, but I'll still love to spend time working with lots of math to better understand physical systems/solve related problems. But isn't the very goal of doing a PhD, to have the basic qualification of mainly doing research in academia? Is it unrealistic to be interested in research but not academia?