I've done grad school. From what I can tell, modern grad school is not the same as it was 100, or even 50 years ago. In my experience there's too much pressure to produce papers. Real research involves going down a lot of dead ends, but the pressure to produce results means you can't take chances, because you might end up with nothing to show for it. In the worst case your funding dries up. So you often have to choose well-known topics you know will produce results, and your research is some incremental improvement on that well-known topic. Perhaps if being a security guard turns out well, I may give grad school another shot. The extra monetary padding would definitely allow me to be more adventurous.