"On 27 October, the EDPB adopted an urgent binding decision ... to impose a ban on the processing of personal data for behavioural advertising on the legal bases of contract and legitimate interest ..."
Under GDPR Article 6, all processing of personal data requires one of the following lawful bases: consent, contractual obligation, legal obligation, vital interests of a person, public interest, or legitimate interests of the controller. The ban says that Meta can't use two of these as bases---contract, legitimate interest---for behavior advertising. Behavior advertising that is consented to is a-okay.
That's not at all true. The citizenship question was removed from the 2020 Decennial Census by the Supreme Court in Department of Commerce v New York (2019) which held the Department of Commerce failed to provide a genuine justification for the decision to add the citizenship question (as required by the Administrative Procedure Act), instead providing a contrived and pretextual explanation.
That was the administrative reason why the question was not permitted. The case was raised to begin with because of fears it would result in undercounting non-citizens, who would be less likely to respond because the don’t trust that the data would remain private. This explanation is outlined in the section called “2020 Census” in the Wikipedia article you linked.
> Forget the outside stuff. ... Feeling like a failure or success is almost a worthless concern as you’re clearly nearly done with a huge life goal. ... Marriages are fundamentally just a societal complication of a relationship ...
Ungenerous translation: That thing that's been really important to you for four years -- just forget about it. If you stop feeling bad about it that you'll stop feeling bad about it. Also marriage is objectively a silly institution. Sounds like you'd like to get married. Maybe that makes you silly. Getting a PhD though -- that's going to change your life forever! You'll be proud! If you're not proud because you don't like your sub-field, well ... maybe that also makes you silly!
To the OP: Sounds like stuff's really hard right now. I'm sorry for that. Grad school is damn hard some times and relationships are too. If find the above advice reassuring or helpful, great! If not, try to brush it off and read other more supportive comments. I hope things get better for you soon.
From the press release (https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/edpb-urgent-binding-de...):
Under GDPR Article 6, all processing of personal data requires one of the following lawful bases: consent, contractual obligation, legal obligation, vital interests of a person, public interest, or legitimate interests of the controller. The ban says that Meta can't use two of these as bases---contract, legitimate interest---for behavior advertising. Behavior advertising that is consented to is a-okay.