Time Capsule #182
Where to next?
Hi,
I was looking forward to this newsletter — for the first time in a long time — and am happy to share it!
The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
—Albert Einstein
✏️ 5 Years Later
This newsletter was easier to write back when it was my only obligation outside of the little work I had to do; and when I felt like no one was reading it. There was no pressure to write it, or to do so in any particular style, and so it was fun and sustainable. I am going to try to get back to that feeling. I think it will make me enjoy this great hobby of mine once again, and write more newsletters in the process.
There have been many changes in my life in the last five years. I have grown in many dimensions; I no longer make decisions for myself only. But despite this growth in confidence, responsibility, ability, and experience over the last few years I am feeling more anxious, claustrophobic, and uncertain than ever when it comes to my life and its design. I have been so caught up in doing all the things that I am supposed to be doing (I think?), that I fear I am slowly creating a life that I think I wouldn’t enjoy and excel at in the long term should the current path continue. So I would like today’s newsletter to be one in which I detail my thoughts on where I’ve gone the last 5 years, and I would like to go in the next 5.
My PhD is basically done — I am planning to defend later this year, and so I am finally encountering the question of what comes next. I have dedicated my life and energy to my work over the last 5 years. I have no regrets, and it has produced good results. I have some teaching experience, a substantial enough body of work, and enough ideas for a creativity research program for at least 5 years. While creativity is my main research area now — and the research topic most likely to give me the greatest and most immediate academic success — I have quietly fallen interested in another line of research which is adjacent to it which I find extremely exciting, intellectually stimulating, and undoubtedly important.
What I am struggling with when it comes to this traditional academic path which is before me is that it seems to me that much the things that I enjoy about my work, and would enjoy about it in the future, will no longer be my primary responsibility in an academic position. The current academic system is such that, as a professor, your role in the research process slowly moves from one that involves doing all the work — and writing all the papers, which I love to do — to one that involves high-level supervision, teaching, and, perhaps most importantly, hunting for grant money to facilitate any work that goes on in your lab, which will be a primary metric by which your success as an academic will be judged. I am already starting to see how important the latter job is; whilst I like writing grants, primarily because I enjoy writing and secondarily because feels good to win at something as competitive as a grant application, I mostly love research because I enjoy coming up with research ideas, developing studies to pursue those ideas, writing the papers that result from those studies, and doing a little teaching, speaking, and mentorship along the way. I find it quite unfortunate that just as I have begun to feel like I am on to something intellectually with my creativity work, my role in the intellectual aspects of the work will slowly diminish, and my job will be more to provide resources for others to do the work rather than to doing the work myself.
So when I think about what I want the next phase of my career to look like, I don’t exactly know what to think. On one hand I am very well suited to an academic career which [in theory] that allows me to chase my intellectual curiosities with the freedom and security to do so. But I am also thinking that this might be idealistic and naive, and that if I continue as I am, I will end up playing “the game” of academia and forgo all the passion and intellectual curiosity that has motivated my work to begin with. But given how single-minded I have been over the last few years, and the fact that I have yet to see any job better suited to my inclinations and abilities, I don’t know what other options I have that would provide the enjoyment and meaning that a job in academia would. There are many great jobs out there, but it just feels too big of a risk to leave the academy when I have invested so much good time building a CV in a field that is so suited to my personality and interests.
So what do I want my ideal life to look like in the next 5 years, should I be able to have it my way (this has always proved a useful exercise for myself):
I would like to be spending my days writing, with full creative license, about things I am interested in and that allow me to learn something in the process. I would like to keep working with the younger generation, because I enjoy and value their perspective and because it feels good to help others grow, and I would like to have the freedom to design my schedule, day-to-day and month-to-month, as I wish (which I can be happy to say I have to some extent already). I would like the space to have a life outside of my work. And of course, I would like to have the financial means and security in my job to do the above to the best of my abilities.
Fiat lux.
Let there be light.
💡 Food for Thought
You can't be what you can't see: expose yourself to new experiences and new role models.
🔗 Sunday Best
The Lost Tools of Learning — Dorothy Sayers
The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do.
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Be a man and follow me not. I found my path, so you find yours.
—Martin Sugrue
Yours Truly,
AT