As I was doing the readings I was trying to pay attention to my immediate feelings and emotional responses to the texts, and I noticed that I felt particularly stressed out while I was reading the chapter from How to Build a Life on academic guilt. I don’t think this is the fault of the author, who approached the topic with generosity, thoughtfulness and an admirable commitment to honesty. Rather, I sense that there’s a point, under late-capitalism or neoliberal austerity, in which conversations about mental health inevitably begin to feel exhausting because a necessary and foundational solution to many of those problems—structural change—is so difficult to achieve. For that reason, both mental health issues and discourse around mental health issues often make me feel tired and stuck in a repetitive loop; sometimes, I even get sick of strategies for addressing mental health, though I know that they’re well-intentioned and often very helpful. This might be because burnout can sometimes be so total that even a proposed solution (gentle as it may be) feels like a chore, like one more thing to add to the list of behavioral habits/changes that one must adopt in order to keep functioning within this very dysfunctional system.

I think that’s why reading about the pervasiveness of academic guilt within the academy made me feel despair—in particular, Iacono Lobo’s admission that she kept working while she was in labor freaked me out and honestly made me feel a little panicked about the prospect of spending the next five to seven years around academics. I am at heart a rather lazy person, but I also enjoy reading and learning new things, which means that my pace of work and my attitudes about work will vary greatly depending on which environment I’m in. In other words, if I’m around a lot of people who feel academic guilt, it’s easy for me to get sucked into that ambient sentiment and start feeling it as well. And while I think Lobo is really good about countering the ideology of academic guilt, I couldn’t help but feel that the solution to this problem shouldn’t be a mindset shift: it should just be less work. And I don’t even mean work as in the paid labor of teaching (though I believe in strong boundaries and protections for the labor a university asks its workers to perform)—I mean academic coursework. I know it’s maybe taboo or absurd to suggest this, but what if faculty just assigned….less coursework for those completing PhD programs? Why do we normalize 1000-2000 pages of reading a week? This is mostly a rhetorical question because I know what the answers will be (rigor, training, pursuit of knowledge, etc), and part of me agrees with the answers. But another part of me feels like it doesn’t have to be this way. We can do less work while still doing meaningful work; we have our whole lives to read and write!

Something else that struck me from the readings was the discussion in “Self-Care as Professionalization” about faculty modeling healthy self-care and work habits. In some ways I felt a knee-jerk skepticism to this point—mostly because I feel it would be hard for me to see a faculty member’s lifestyle and habits as replicable for my own personal context, since a faculty member occupies such a different relationship to job and professional security (assuming we’re talking about tenured faculty). But I do think it’s ultimately a very useful suggestion, and that one thing faculty members can better model for us is a refusal to romanticize the academy and academic work. We know that sometimes academic work gets framed by academics as an automatic virtue or even a moral good, and that can obfuscate the fact that academic work is also a profession. I think this slippage is easy because many of us do feel that reading and writing are noble pursuits and fulfilling ways to spend time. It’s very difficult to not have a moralizing strain of discourse present in even the most forgiving and anti-work discourses about academia. For example, even if we don’t valorize work or perfectionism, we might still valorize qualities like “enthusiasm,” “passion,” and “inquisitiveness” within the academy. These are all personal traits that we assign to good scholars, and that PhD admissions teams will look for even if they’re not paying attention to more traditional “metrics” of skill, like GPA.

But what if, sometimes, we don’t feel enthusiastic or passionate about the work we’re doing? What if we view academia as a job, not a pursuit or an interest? I don’t think this kind of thing is ever cut and dry; I think people fluctuate and move in and out of feeling passionate about their work and their research. But it’s true that particularly now, during a time of pandemic, we might be finding it hard to feel stimulated by things. I know I right now occasionally struggle to sustain interest in anything, and would much rather pursue a simple pleasure like eating or watching TV (the kind of “lateral agency” pleasures that Lauren Berlant describes in “Slow Death,” her amazing chapter on eating and food in Cruel Optimism) rather than an intellectual interest, even though I know the latter has the potential to be more fulfilling in the long run. It’s often this impulse, rather than a perception of my own competence or skill, that occasionally makes me feel like an imposter within academia, where everyone is assumed to be bright and curious (other times, I do feel extremely enthusiastic about the work I’m doing; and then there are times outside of that when I don’t feel enthusiastic but I do feel grateful, if that makes sense). I’m going to stop here because now I’m rambling, but I’d be curious to see if anyone has thoughts on this or has ever felt similarly.

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