In our October "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:
I haven't been able to get much work done in the last nine months on my research because of a problem that is new for me, and I wonder how typical it is for others in academics – emotional pain.
I'm an upper year PhD student who has their dissertation mostly complete. If I needed to, I (and my advisor) feel like I can wrap things up in a month. That has been the case for almost a year now. Also, I've been on the job 'market' since last year.
Every word I type about the thoughts I have on my area of research feels like a scab ripped from my mind. I feel relatively fine writing about anything else. Besides what I imagine are the typical anxiety about rejection and imposter syndrome, I'm feeling a lot of grief and sense of loss among other complicated stuff I cant put really well to words. I'm already not great at taking the time to dwell on writing material to polish things up. Now it's more than just an executive functioning/attention problem. Working on my research and material related to it in my job applications has become a sort of feeling management problem. It makes me wonder if I have a toxic relationship with academia, that this is something that will keep getting worse for me and I'm better off cutting ties with the profession, or whether its because of the context I'm in (covid and job searching despair), that I'm failing to see things objectively.
I've dealt with depression before and this feels different. It feels like grief and loss, less of an autonomous mood and more of a reaction to my world. Does this resonate with anyone here? Is this a sign I should take, that I'm 'burnt out' on philosophy? How does one successfully manage the emotional (instead of motivation) side of getting work done?
This post actually resonates with me a great deal, and I hope we can have a helpful and supportive discussion about the important issues it raises. Allow me to say a few brief things, and then invite readers to share their own experiences and any tips or advice they have for someone grappling with these kinds of issues.
I want to begin by noting that it's entirely possible, given their description of past struggles with depression, that the OP could be struggling with clinical mental health symptoms. Because I'm not a licensed psychologist, the best I can do here is suggest to the reader that consider seeing a licensed professional if they think it might help. That being said, because (again) I'm not qualified to weigh on in clinical matters, for the sake of discussion I am going to take their described situation at face value: as potentially a non-clinical reaction to the academic reality they face.
Bearing this assumption in mind, here is what I will say: I think I've struggled with similar feelings/experiences at numerous instances in my professional life. At a certain point in graduate school, I completely lost my confidence and love for academic philosophy. I loved doing philosophy. However, the 'competition' aspect of the profession–trying to impress grad faculty, worrying about what they thought of me, worrying about publishing, etc.–seemed to sap all of the joy out of it. I eventually found my way through those struggles by the skin of my teeth. However, I faced similar struggles during my 7 years on the job market, six of which were while I was in a VAP position. The job-market was absolutely brutal year-in and year-out, and no matter what I did, it never seemed like enough, and it never seemed like I would find the proverbial 'light at the end of the tunnel.' Alas, I ultimately found my way through those struggles too, and ended up finally getting a permanent job and tenure. And yet now, many years later, I've found myself grappling with some form of acedia. No doubt the pandemic isn't helping. As other readers pointed out in the thread on acedia, they've been grappling with similar issues: pandemic conditions just add to the stresses we already have.
Anyway, to make a long story short, my own experience in academia has been very much an 'up and down' affair. There have been times that I've been quite happy in my career. However, there have also been significant periods of time that I've really had to struggle through, times I've felt totally burnt out, and indeed, times when (like this reader) I wondered whether I had a toxic relationship with academia. I don't know how many readers have had similar experiences. However, research on mental health in academia suggests these kinds of experiences are quite common. And I don't think reasons why are hard to find. Academia is not an easy career path. I played baseball through college, and one of the things I often heard said during my time as a player is that baseball is that baseball is one of the more psychologically difficult sports there is because of just how much you fail. Consider, after all, the fact that the very best hitters in the game hit a little over .300. That means that as a hitter, you succeed only 30% of the time. The vast majority of the time, you fail to get a hit–including in situations when your team needs you to come through. Now turn to academia. In philosophy, we're taught to poke holes in everything–so, in grad school and beyond, the vast majority of your ideas will face stiff resistance and criticism. Journal rejection rates are routinely well over 90%, you get rejected from virtually all of the jobs you apply to, and if your work does get discussed at all, chances are your commentators will point out all of your dumb mistakes. Academic philosophy, in many ways–both at the level of ideas and even more so with jobs–can be just a brutal, seemingly-unrelenting gauntlet.
How can one make it through? The only answer I've ever been able to arrive at is for me to focus as much as I can on the things that drew me to philosophy in the first place: namely, philosophy itself, and the way in which great philosophy teachers I had made a difference in my life. That is, I try–to the best of my ability–to focus on the intrinsic rewards, as well as the very real rewards of seeing the difference one makes in the lives of one's students. Just this week, for example, I had a student who came a very long way as an undergraduate get into an MA program. It was so gratifying to see how far that student come from where he was when he first showed up in one of my classes his freshman year. I don't have terribly good answers above and beyond this, as well as the fact that the times in which I've struggled have been followed by times in which things were better. In many respects, that's life, right? Take relationships, such as marriages or long-term partnerships. There are times when a relationship doesn't go well, and one has to fight through the nadirs, only to see better times in the relationship. Should one get out of toxic relationships? By all means, just as one should probably get out of a toxic career. The question, I think, that one has to ask oneself is, "Is this situation genuinely toxic, or is this just a low time that I can fight through toward a better future?" I don't have any simple answers here when it comes to attempting to continue one's career as a philosopher. Every one of us must confront and answer these questions ourselves.
But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? Have you struggled with experiences like the OP's? Did you find your way through? If so, did anything in particular help? Or, alternatively, did you leave academic philosophy? If so, did you find it a better, healthier choice?
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