Having a Ph.D. confers relatively few benefits outside of academia. The writing style and skills taught in academia are very very different from that of industry, and the opportunity cost of pursuing a Ph.D. vs going into software engineering (or something similarly renumerative) is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I would suggest that if you don't know exactly what you want to do with your life, you would be well-suited to doing something that earns you a bunch of money. This money can later be used to finance grander ambitions when you have figured out what you want to do.
I'll turn this question around on you: why is a Ph.D. the best way of accomplishing what you want to do?
As to the drudgery of office work-- "office work" is, i think, a false category. I spent hours of unbearable tedium performing repetitive reactions in lab during my PhD, and my current cushy Microsoft engineering job is enormously more creative and interesting while paying approximately 10x as much. For someone with the smarts to get a ph.d., retraining into engineering is very, very easy.
One other generally undiscussed aspect of the working world is that, for a number of reasons, your employers mostly treat you with respect roughly proportional to your salary. Ph.D.s, consequently, are often treated very poorly. This probably contributes to their poor mental health, as documented elsewhere.
The mental health of PhD students is the main reason I’m not interested in doing one. There are lots of surveys showing terrible symptoms, e.g. this one where 36% of PhD students had sought treatment for depression or anxiety related to their PhD. That’s nearly 5x higher than the baseline 8% of Americans. You can find many similar surveys, and my anecdotal experience of asking PhD students whether they’re enjoying the experience has only confirmed this dismal picture.
I'm working on my master's degree, and during a talk with one of my professors, the subject "Would you be interested in pursuing a PhD?" came up. I've given this a lot of thought over the last few months, but I'm at a loss for a response. I believe the issue is that with a bachelor's or master's degree, you have a good idea of what you're getting yourself into and what is expected of you, however with a PhD, it's much more difficult to get information (at least for me / in my country).
I had some work experience before going to university, and I know I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing monotonous office work. During my master's studies, I intend to participate in as many extracurricular events as possible in order to gain a grasp of "department life" or at the very least a sense of what it's like to work in science. I enjoy working with the team and the professor, although I have had more contact with the postdoc so far. With this respect, I have a few questions and your feedback might help to list the pros and cons