Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

> As a fellow immigrant, can confirm, hard work works.

You can confirm that hard work can work. Or seem to work.

> Once the professors hit tenure, the research professors mostly abdicated their teaching responsibilities, whereas the non-research just kept on teaching.

It's a lifecycle. Just-tenured professors are expected to spend those years being as productive as possible on research. That's what they're there for. Full professors conversely will neglect their research and focus much more on teaching, mentorship, and take on administrative roles.

I work with primarily academic types, and I’m careful to always use soft and work-neutral language as well as a few tricks I have learned to kinda “hack” out of their typical work mode and into their regular personality.

I’m notorious for chitchat, and one of my favorite ones is “What have you been doing for fun lately?” because of how useful it is for starting pleasant conversations. I’ve learned that a lot of graduates here (DC) like video gaming, hiking, and traveling.

I never say “we need to get X done by Y” with young people. I say “Ok, the next milestone task for us is X. How are we feeling about getting that done around or even before Y?” And with time, people learn that I want the honest answer, not the sugar coat. You can’t BS a BSer, as it goes.

Anyhow, my main thing is: when someone starts being weird or evasive when I’m asking about leisure, I assume that there’s a stressor in their life and often I’ll tell them exactly that. Sometimes they come clean, and say they feel the imposter syndrome (always the Ivy Leaguers) or that they don’t feel connected to the work and significance of it, or sometimes it’s just personal business and not for me to get involved with. I think it’s just a learned behavior with the young generations to always stay at a high velocity rather than taking time to just BE worried about their family or health or whatever it is, and let it happen and move on. Instead, they just kinda put it on a plate in their mind and keep scurrying forward to the things they think they’re supposed to be doing.

A lot of employers/managers don’t think like I do, but I think: if you’re so stressed out that your hands are shaking, I don’t want you poring over medical/financial/industrial data. You’re a huge liability, and you should be getting rested and relaxed to do this stuff. The culture has failed them in teaching them NOT to address these things as crucially important in their lives, or has robbed them of the financial stability to consider doing sk in the first place.

Anyhow. Let’s clock out early, lol.

I think about this as another of those "industries" in which a lot people want to get into. Similar to art, animation, acting, screen writing, recording artist music; I suppose any creative industries will be like this.

All these 'industries' become exploitative (possibly capitalism has something to do with how this happens. but let's stay on topic)

So then, I consider this pattern of exploitation -- of "put up with it or get out", to be a sort of collective (or cultural, organizational) trauma in the sense that it self-perpetuates.

People join, get overworked, become traumatized, and then some make it through. Now, once on the other side, they proceed to overwork newcomers.

It's very common to think "I made it through, and I've become what I am because of those experiences" a rationalization of the trauma.

But I wonder about them who make it... was it because of overworked abuse, or was it in spite of it?

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their energy was going into cultivating relationships that would aid their career trajectories, rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research.

They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.

The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?

Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives, and maybe some politicians with special interests, and if they're not interested in supporting research into your field of interest, you might as well forget about it, unless you can finance a million-dollar-a-year research lab on your own. I suppose it's possible, but not very common.

Regardless, not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about, unfortunately. Overwork and risking burnout might be part of the price you have to pay to get there, at least in our rather dystopian modern American society. (Notably, the author of this piece relocated from UK to Norway...)