If the only consideration is work versus pay, probably not.

A career isn't just work and pay, though.
You've got to think about the other factors, and I don't just mean idealism that can be exploited. I mean the type of work you do, getting to be your own boss in a lot of ways, getting to set your own hours, etc. That is a contrast with industry where someone else is your boss, you have to do what they tell you to get paid, they set your hours, etc. There is no "right" or "wrong", but different people have different priorities.

With clinical work, you can be your own boss with a private practice and still collaborate with researchers without being faculty. I think a lot of people prefer that option since there is less administrative bullshit when you're not a heavily involved in ongoing university affairs.

The Academic Life

The academic life allows and provides most of what I desire from a career.

• The time of day you work doesn't usually matter as long as you get shit done.
• Most of the day-to-day work is actually writing: papers, grants, emails, reviews, syllabi, more emails, reference letters.
• There are one-to-one or one-to-small-group social parts of the job: mentoring grad students, mentoring undergrads, emails, interviews.
• There are one-to-many social parts of the job: teaching classes, giving lectures, speaking at conferences.
• There are many-to-many social parts of the job: networking and socializing as part of a faculty.

For more fine-grained details, see My pre-pandemic day-to-day.

Academia is far from perfect

There are a variety of boring administrative tasks: reading submission guidelines, application instructions, emails, administrative forms, meetings, etc. However, when I bemoaned this fact to my carpenter brother, he said, "Every job has administrative bullshit. You cannot escape it." That helped me accept these flaws as an inescapable part of working in the world. There will always be some bullshit: pick the bullshit you can accept that comes with the most benefits you love.

Limitations of the Field

For those that care about societal impact and helping people through applied science, the limitations surrounding our findings might also be worth considering.

While I am personally driven to pushing science forward, I don't think it is unreasonable to suggest that the 21st century is an early stage where psychological findings are pretty dubious. The state of the field is not like that of physics, which has hundreds of additional years of intensive scientific study behind it. In psychology, we face multiple historic and ongoing crises and we still do statistics in ways that statisticians balk at. Will our findings be robust in 30 or 100 years? Probably not, for the most part, and while that is part of being a scientist in a young field, you have to ask yourself whether you're okay with this sort of work and this sort of legacy. The science we do doesn't always help people today and won't necessarily be upheld in the future. Indeed, it can be difficult to say what we even learn when we learn about the average.

Remember: don't die on someone else's hill.

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