No one tells you, before you start a doctoral program, that the literature review will feel like trying to drink from a fire hose while someone keeps adding more hoses. You read one paper and it cites twelve others. You read three of those and suddenly you have forty-seven tabs open and a growing suspicion that everything important was already said in 1987.
I spent the first few weeks of mine in a low-grade panic. Not because the material was beyond me — I'd been working in the field for years, and a lot of what I was reading connected to things I already knew from practice. The panic was more existential: how do you ever decide you've read enough?
The answer, I eventually realized, isn't a quantity of sources. It's a quality of understanding — specifically, the moment when you can articulate where your question sits in the existing conversation and why it hasn't been answered yet. That shift from "reading everything" to "reading toward an argument" changed the whole experience.
The literature review isn't a demonstration of how much you've read. It's a map of the territory that justifies why your research needs to exist.