grind culture. (week 16 of 2024)

It is pretty easy to figure out who I am and which university I work for, and so here is the mandatory disclaimer about how "the opinions expressed in this blog reflect my own experience and thoughts and not that of my employer". Here goes.

In 2019 I struck the academic lottery - which is to land a tenure-track position in a university. Many PhDs have this as a dream job and I know how very lucky I am that I get to live this dream, even though there are tons of other academics who are way more qualified and much more competent for this job than I am.

But since the pandemic I am starting to feel disillusioned about The Academic Life. It is a thing that I am still processing and am still trying to understand the reasons for this feeling. In this week's post I dive into one of the many reasons: And it is the rise of grind culture in academia.

Grind culture is this expectation that you should be constantly working, publishing papers, attending conferences every other month, replying to email at all times of the day... From the old days of Twitter humblebragging about the number of hours one worked during the week (along with bar graphs and spreadsheets about the division of time across research/teaching/admin) was a thing among academics. There are these writing sessions where people gather together to push out that dissertation, manuscript, grant application. I seem to get emails from everyone at all times of the day. Why are we working this hard?

Well, obviously for the early career folks like me, a key reason is to achieve the ultimate goal of tenure. But I sort of feel that there is also a broader culture of hustle and grind that is permeating modern society. Which isn't a good thing. The sense is that if you are not working all the time, then you are not productive, you are not efficient, you are not making good use of your time. So self-worth and identity becomes tied to what you are able to produce and document and measure. [I am currently reading this fascinating book called "The Tyranny Of Metrics" and might have more to say about this topic of mismeasurement later.]

The disillusionment comes from the mismatch of how academia thinks an academic like myself should be spending their time, and how I conceptualize the nature of teaching and academic work, which is inherently a deeply creative endeavor and a process that cannot be rushed.

My solution? I try to work as little as possible during the week and basically see what I can get away with. It may compromise tenure, but I am just not willing to work so much just so that I can publish a paper every 3-4 months (while doing everything else like manage RAs, supervise students, manage grants, do random admin things, run the research lab, and teach!). I get that this approach will seem idealistic and entitled to many who would love to be in my position. But honestly, at the end of each week when I do my weekly review (GTD fan here) I never once wished I had worked more, only that I had worked less and done other fun things instead. When I look back at my life, I want to have more memories than staring at my linear mixed effects model in RStudio.

Random: My goal for this blog is to write one post a week for the rest of 2024. I am curious to see how far it goes!