I can't give you any advice on the consequences of quitting, but hopefully I can give you some in terms of deciding what the right action is for you.

You need to speak to your supervisor, as soon as possible. If you really are this close to quitting you have nothing to lose anyway. The best thing to do is calmly explain that you're very worried about your lack of research question and hence lack of progress, and it's beginning to make you reconsider continuing with the program. Explain that you are willing to give your best shot but that can only happen if you redefine the research question to include clear cut goals and objectives. It *should* be in their best interests to get you back on track. Do you have some sort of graduate committee in your department? If your supervisor is unable or unwilling to help you make changes you may need to talk to another trusted academic about this, and that is usually the purpose for the existence of such committees. A PhD is supposed to be akin to a research apprenticeship, not a case of throwing someone into the deep end and seeing if they can figure out a way to not drown.

Meanwhile, and probably more importantly giving that you are generally feeling overwhelmed, let down and miserable by the whole PhD process I would find out what support services your university offers, such as counselling, and book in for a few sessions to try and help figure out what you really want the outcome to be. Before making any final decision, if you're leaning towards quitting, perhaps take a few weeks (minimum 3) holidays/leave to do stuff that you enjoy but to also think about the pros and cons of quitting vs staying without having to go in to work and get on with things at the same time.

I hope you start to feel better soon...

Hi QuittyMcQuitface,

I don't usually post on here, but your post compelled me to setup an account so I could reply. First off, sorry to hear you've been having a rough time of it since starting the PhD. It's certainly not easy, and there are a lot of things about doing one that I think they should include as mandatory reading before someone decides to embark on this career path.

I could have written the exact same post as you, everything from not having a well thought out research question to supervisor struggles in terms of no concrete direction to take the research question in. If I am managing to turn things around with a view of completion, you definitely can too (If you choose to... if not, that's perfectly ok too).

My two cents: I think a lot of your problems at the moment (based on personal experience) are intertwined... Not having a research question will kill your passion, without the passion you go to your uni and achieve the sqrt[f***-all] every day, achieving nothing every day will chip away at any passion you have left, and so the cycle continues. Eventually you've broken down to a point where you say "F***-it, academia is not for me, the system is sh*t anyway, I'm out of here", and this is the point where you need to figure out whether it's the situation you hate (the root of which appears to stem from a badly designed project) or whether academia truly isn't for you, which is pretty damn hard to figure out in the given situation. To top it all off, there's intense shame about wanting to leave, intense fear of failing if you stay and usually intense isolation from having nobody to talk to any of this about. All of these things only act to make things worse.

Running out of space here, so I will continue with advice below...