Academia is a field in which participants are, in effect, brainwashed to believe that it is shameful to quit academia. Students and PhDs without a tenure-track job often languish in poorly-paid, labor-intensive postdoctoral or adjunct positions with little or no job security and no opportunities for advancement. Even PhDs who manage a tenure-track job spend too many hours a day fulfilling unrealistic expectations of publishing, teaching, and service, for pay far below that of other industries. 

Why?

Academics often spend 10+ years training in their specific field. After such a long commitment, it can be difficult to tear yourself away from academia. If you start asking yourself why you made all those sacrifices, you may feel obligated to stay in academia just to prove that it wasn’t for nothing.

Maybe the self-esteem of academics is too tied-up in the self-conception of themselves as intelligent, hard-working, and devoted. Because academia is a moral calling unlike other professions–we learn, or are taught, to believe that the money doesn’t matter because we are doing something that truly calls to our hearts and our minds–something great about the human endeavor–something more real than a desk job. I wonder to what extent this attitude is tied up in the origins of modern-day academia as arms of the Church. Many universities, especially old prestige universities like Oxford in the UK or Harvard in the US, were at first aimed primarily to educate the clergy. And a religious calling was not always a calling (you could certainly be forced to become a clergyman), but in the modern world that is certainly our conception of it. Because it is not a necessity, and because it is difficult, it must be something to do with your soul.

This seems eminently unhealthy to me.

Events that fill up space and reach their end when someone dies may cause us wonder, but some thing—or an endless number of things—dies with each man’s last breath, unless, as theosophy conjectures, the world has a memory. In the past, there was a day when the last eyes to have seen Christ were closed; the battle of Junín and Helen’s face each died with the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or worthless memory will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a brown horse grazing in an empty lot at the comer of Serrano and Charcas, a stick of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

Jorge Luis Borges, from The Witness
(via nemophilies)

I’ve always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth.

Robert Ford, Westworld