how to heal from academia

you need to rediscover and reinvent yourself

the precarious vocation

I am one of the many people that got a PhD and at one pointed wanted to be a career academic, but did not end up doing so. I want to talk about my own journey from a young person in love with learning and the academy, through trying to do alt-ac in tech, and finally to my current pace of life which values lots of things alongside my lifelong love of learning and doing cool stuff.

I think when you go into academia, or try to, you have a vision of yourself committing your life to your discipline. It’s very much like an old school vocation, or going into the priesthood or a monastery. You commit yourself to a particular domain, you relocate, you associate with new and likeminded people, and so on. In some sense, it approaches what is known in sociology as a “total institution.”

These types of places, where you change so many things around you right away, have a way of re-orienting your values, goals, desires, tastes, habits, and so forth. Even small things like clothing and speech habits become influenced by the norms in your academic department and broader community. This makes a lot of sense, because if your big goal is to become an academic and devote your life to a particular study, the way you get there is generally by convincing people you fit in—and not only do you fit in, but you are an exemplar of whatever your field is. This is how you get a scarce professorship.

So to fulfill this vocation which is likely borne out of a love of the thing itself (in my case, social science and learning in general), you must do all of these things which are largely unrelated to that thing.

And unlike going into the priesthood or the convent, your acceptance in academia pre-tenure is entirely conditional. You are precarious, and your situation can change or be revoked at any time. Statistically, you commit to academia but it almost never commits to you back because tenure-track and tenured professorships are so scarce.

A thing I think almost nobody appreciates is what this level of precariousness and needing-to-be-an-exemplar do to your brain. Well, people appreciate it in I think the experiential sense but I’ve never heard anybody talk about it in a coherent way.

This situation makes you put yourself on hold. Like, there is a you that enters grad school. And sometime in that process you realize it’s gonna be super hard to get a job. And then you work backwards and ask the very logical question of “what do I do to get a job?” And the list there is basically unbounded—you can always find more things to do. Make more connections, go to more seminars, submit more papers, use hipper words, and so on.

So you say to yourself one day: “I need to focus on academia: I’ll go back to focusing on relationships / my mental health / my spiritual journey / my hobbies / my friends later.” And once you get in that rut, and get on the treadmill—a lot of people never get out.

So you’ve taken your self—a fully formed person!—and put it on a shelf like a bobblehead and you’re like “I’ll come back to you sometime.” But it’s so easy not to.

(It’s also worth noting as an aside if you have any tendencies to deal with feelings of not being good enough by working through it, academia will almost certainly prey on these and cause mental health issues.)

identity

What happens I think is this total institution ends up creating a new identity which doesn’t replace your old identity, but sort of fits on top of it or obscures its view. And if you’re successful at academia and that kind of thing works for you, maybe you never return to the identity underneath.

But, again, statistically you will not be successful. And so when you fall out of it—whether through a tough job search that doesn’t pan out, or being denied tenure, or by getting a private sector job—you have to pick up that bobblehead that has been sitting there for 5-8 years and has been collecting dust and you sort of have to look at it and remember who you are outside this institution.

And that feels really painful because a big part of becoming an academic (or trying to) is “leaving behind” all of these gauche parts of yourself that just don’t fly in academia. This is part of the reason why you hear a lot of academics talk and they don’t talk like regular people, it’s like this horrible tortured prose (which I have written about here before). Academic speech is a big signaling game, and you’re trying to signal you’re really the most in the club. You are the club.

So if you leave academia, there’s both picking up your old identity but now you have this like melting wax figure of a new identity which doesn’t really fit in the outside world, and on top of that your old identity (the dusty bobblehead) is something you are kinda repulsed by because of your hip academic training.

A lot of people try to roll forward with the academic identity on the outside world. But that’s fairly lonely because you’re playing a social game that almost nobody else is playing. A marching band of one.

the process

So at least for me the challenge of recovering from academia was dusting off the bobblehead and sort of like remembering who I was. So first you have to remember: Who were you before academia? What were the things that motivated you and were important to you? Those things are in fact still important to you. And despite whatever complex feelings you may have about these things now with your academic-ified brain, those things will guide you. Make a list. When you were 15, 18, and 22, what were your north star values and goals? Day to day what were the important things to you?

You then have to engage with those things, and the secondary feelings that come up from your time in academia. Like, let’s say that before you went to grad school, you loved playing music, but you didn’t have much time for that in school. And maybe now you feel like a little bit icky about music—it’s juvenile, it’s not real work, there’s no money in that, etc. Are those icky feelings what you actually think? Or are they from the melting wax sculpture that you created so you couldn’t see the dusty bobblehead?

In my experience, a lot of things I thought were gauche were actually just me trying to fit in. And when you’re in the total institution, you really try and convince yourself that like yeah playing music is juvenile (or whatever). But outside of that intense social environment you don’t actually feel that way. You like music, plain and simple.

So you have to remember, you have to engage with how you feel, and then you have to actually do things. You have changed in the meantime, while you put yourself on hold. We are complex and we evolve even when we’re not looking. So yes, there’s a dusty bobblehead, but it’s subtly different than you remember. When you dust it off and look at it closely, it won’t look exactly the same. It may look quite different! Such is being a human.

But re-starting where you left off is the best place to begin I found. Do things you used to love or used to dream about, and see how they feel. The idea is to fully get rid of the wax sculpture pseudo-identity that you constructed and go back to being the bobblehead.

healing

For me, I went through a lot of this kind of thing unconsciously. I was looking for something to keep the academic dream alive, or I was lost without the structure and clear reward system I had gotten used to in grad school. It was hard to adjust to the outside world (I was never particularly well adjusted). I literally went to a mental institution. So I don’t mean to make this sound easy or linear—it’s not. But it is possible. I really do feel like I have done the academic detox, and now my values and goals are quite different than they were 5 or 7 years ago. I’m much more focused on relationships, I go to church, I have a clearer sense of self / moral center. I feel a sense of identity from the inside rather than being imposed from the outside. And my sense of identity isn’t grand—I’m not the smartest guy in the world and I don’t have the fanciest title. I try to be a good friend, a good dad to my cat and dog, a good mentor to people that come to my card shop, and I try to learn and do interesting things. It’s not complicated, and it works for me.

As a last note, I don’t mean to give the idea I have no issues—I have plenty of things I’m still working on. And improving as a person is a lifelong journey. But I do feel like I’m going in the right direction and my acceptance as a person isn’t conditional on arcane factors outside of my control.