Exceptional essay Petya. I am going to get a copy of this book as I think it sounds like something I would enjoy. I also love how towards the end you focus on building learning opportunities for yourself that may not have been viable if you had continued in academia. That thought process works nicely with my own lifelong learning philosophy. Thanks for the insights.
The part that I don't cover in this post is the 18 years that sit between leaving the program and now. That's a story of not giving up on my mind, when I had plenty PLENTY of opportunities to do so.
Reading Phillips is frustrating at times because he just refuses to prescribe solutions, there are no 5 steps to giving up the right way in this book. But I think you would enjoy being in conversation with him. I also got some of his other books that looked interesting. He is very prolific!
This was such a wonderful read. I'm in the fourth year of my PhD program and I contemplate giving up on a weekly basis... I am extremely stubborn by nature, however, and have just a few months left. You've convinced me to get a copy of On Giving Up, thank you for your recommendation and thoughts!
Thank you, Molly! What are you studying and where? I think that in the right program with a good advisor and a good cohort, grad school can feel SO good.... Sadly, many of us are making program choices on very little information when we are entirely too young. When I was still in school, there was an older woman who was taking a bunch of classes in my program and I remember her always being so happy in class and wondered why she would be so chirpy all the time.... I would love to be in grad school now and I would be chirpy too! 😂😂😂
I’m in a geosciences department, studying hydrology! I think for me, the ‘giving up’ feeling is more burnout than anything wrong with the program. I went straight to PhD from undergrad—like you said, entirely too young—and am simply ready to finish school. Soon!
For sure. In the book Phillips says that a lot of the commonplace advice on why one should not give up is based on the premise that life is always worth living or that things work out. But that's obviously not always true... and people should feel comfortable choosing to let go and, as you said, control their own life.
Interesting, Petya. I have to say I am the exact opposite: I give up on things too easily, perhaps...as soon as something doesn't feel a good fit, regardless of how "good" the opportunity, I walk away. What interests me though is that I experience some of the shame in much the same way, perceiving others' to be "better" than me because they have persevered, despite my husband informing me on numerous occasions that it is one of the qualities he most admires in me- that I instinctively know when to walk away. Huh.
Oh. Phillips would congratulate you for being in touch with your non-compliant, playful side. That's the part of you who helps you feel ALIVE. You are not conforming to personal and cultural ideals of what one should like or do and for how long! I agree with John! This is something to celebrate about yourself!
Yep. I took an MA and left the program too. But my advisor was very nice about the whole thing and once I moved away from that path I never thought again about being a professor. Though I do still have a hang up about being thought one of the smart ones. Working for years in an academic environment without a PhD by choice did not help matters.
Reading this I did wonder: what if the person who received your email had just validated your choice? Would you have wondered less? Not that there is anything wrong with wondering… And also, I think about what the refusal to be kind and affirming of someone “giving up” says about how those academics really feel about their own choice.
Abra, the more we talk ... the more I realize we have so much in common. What was your program in? My husband is a PhD and was a professor for several years after I dropped out (he's left academia since, too, for different reasons) and we were in college settings a lot. Being the non-PhDed spouse of an academic was a whole other thing.... Again, not great.
I wonder why nobody said anything to me at the time... and I don't think that their response should matter, I was doing what was good for me... but a kind word on departure would have meant everything to me at the time. I was so young (25 years old) and I think the silence really made me feel a lot of shame that I carried around for years after that.
Long live, indeed. And here's to really pushing against the shame of thinking in public as we do now ... because this feels hard in its own entirely different way.
Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition. My only regret is that, if I did have that degree, I could probably find good work just about anywhere in the world. Right now having options like that might feel good.
You are doing a great job! I can’t say I feel any shame about thinking in public but I do sometimes have to revisit my motives, and remind myself why I am putting all this energy into my newsletter project. Otherwise, signals can be confusing…
I should have specified... my shame is around feelings of not being "rigorous" enough. You can take the girl out of the graduate program, but you can never take the graduate program out of the girl. 🫣
Haha. Well. Like I said, you are doing great. People are engaging because you keep it real. But yes, the cutthroat PTSD is another thing I relate to here. Once two grad colleagues and I took a grad level Antro Ling course that was cross listed and the Anthro students were so mean. One sent an email to the entire class list, thinking it was just to one other student I guess, snarking about my intellect… bitch.
Also! You have no idea how many people I've told to apply to the PhD program so they can secure the funding and then drop at the MA level if they don't like it 😂😂😂🦹🏻♀️
I think as we age it becomes easier to see how much what we used to think was our choice and our pain was actually the pain of succumbing to external pressure and going against ourselves. Phillips is very permissive and I love that about his work.
I relate to this so much in that in the course of accepting the same pretty/smart dichotomy it’s since created paralysis in situations that I find intellectually intimidating and/or know that there’s a chance of intellectual failure. Exhibits A-Z: all the Substack posts in draft! 🫠 These reflections of yours are reframing many, many things for me and I’m going to be chewing this well into the foreseeable. Equally, the silence to those emails is such a dodgy move. Ugh, the hegemony, the hubris!!
Ugh. The paralysis is just real. Because if your aspiration is "to be smart".... you can also never be "smart enough". It's such a hard thing to live with.
When I interviewed Celine Nguyen about her reading life she mentioned reading self-help and a reader commented on how wonderful it was that a smart, intellectual person would admit to it. That comment really struck me because it's 100% true that the intellectual crowd - raised to be certain and confident - laughs at the entire self-help complex. But we probably need it the most. 🫠 indeed.
Let me know if you need an accountability buddy for your Substack!
It's totally a snake eating itself! I also realised that then if you don't get praised then you doubt yourself further? Gah!
That is so great about Celine and I have definitely felt that coming from an intellectual family. Even talking about problems gets put through an intellectual lens that's frustrating because if things aren't articulated properly then they're not accepted.
Thank you so much for the accountability buddy offer ❤️ I'll DM you!
What a nice reflection, you have created a nice space here. I definitely want to read this book! It sounds like it has some great insight, based on what you've shared. I used to have a very black and white view of failure - I dropped out of a master's program after a year. I tried law school after that and hated it and left after a semester because I had a lot of stress in my personal life and wasn't doing well. Both of those made me feel like a failure. But I wasn't even 25 years old! Pretty early on in my adult life, I had to accept these as pivots instead of failures. They were not the right path for me, I just had not found the correct path yet. I read a book several years ago called What Color is Your Parachute? that made me think about "failures" and pivots in a different way too. It is a good career book and my therapist at the time recommended it to me.
Also, I had that same smart versus pretty conversation with myself for most of my life. Maybe only in the last ten years I've realized, oh, I think that I can be both, and many other things. <3
I think that the decision of quitting programs feels especially heavy in America where the cost associated with schooling is so insane. I was on a full scholarship at my PhD program and being afraid of losing that was a big factor in struggling with that decision.
This brought tears to my eyes. “Giving up” is such a huge theme for many of us. I see it at some point with every client I’ve ever worked with, and with the client that is myself 😂 it’s part of our personal liberation to challenge what that means. I’ve given up so many things and been pretty relived when I did. The path leading up to it was harrowing as hell but the aftermath, just cruising.
I grant you full reign to mention it whenever 💛 I had a list of all the things I gave up in my first draft of this comment and drinking was of course on there.
“When you've staked your whole sense of self on academic achievement, walking away feels like watching your identity crumble in real time.” 🥹 this part caught me hard in my feelings this morning. Industry work is no Adorno, either, and the presence of those gaps and feeling unable to bridge them on most days is such a haunting. Thank you for this piece.
Sending so much love your way, friend. I was thinking of you while writing this because in a way -- your sacrifice was even bigger than mine after actually completing the full program. Industry is no Adorno, you are right.
A couple of years ago I worked with a career couch and she told me that basically we have our values and those are fairly static throughout our lives because they are deeply ingrained in us through early childhood and adolescence. And these values inform our needs that can shift somewhat throughout life, based on lived experience. The thing to remember is that YOU are YOU, regardless of what you do in life. And also, you can feel certain needs throughout long periods of your life (let's say, your need for deep intellectual engagement)... but you can absolutely satisfy those needs in different ways. You can get to experience a complete sense of fulfillment and satisfaction... but you need to be open-minded about what that looks like. You also need to drop the ego. That last part is my words, not the coach's.
So much of this resonated with me. Looking back I too have built my identify around being smart vs pretty and I’ve found it hard to cancel, quit, or give up. Thank you for a wonderful article. Looking forward to picking up the book!
"I’ve found it hard to cancel, quit, or give up"... 😭
Same. At some point you start to feel like it's a prison of your own making and you get so much energy out of breaking out of that mindset. But it's such hard work. Even Phillips with all his talk about openness and ambiguity admits that it is hard to separate your conditioning from your true wants, needs and desires.
I relate to this very much. I wanted one thing from early adulthood: the time and freedom to pursue my creative and intellectual life. But that’s not the only thing I wanted. I also wanted not to experience financial stress, to have security including job security, and to have a family, to do honorable stimulating work that in some way benefited others. How can one have everything? Compromises must be made somewhere. As a once-budding neuroscientist, I realized that I didn’t need to be the one making the discoveries; I just wanted to know what they were. The feeling of awe and amazement was more important than doing that work myself. So I made compromises that were good ones for me, allowing a satisfying professional life outside academia, but with enough autonomy and control that I could still feel a (compromised but significant) sense of pursuing my own inner curiosity. Finally I am in a position now to shift the balance away from professional life and toward my inner life. The compromise was not with smart as an identity - I am who I am, pretty firmly - but with how I spend my time and how well it accords with the balance I seek. Which changes over time. That’s part of this whole topic for me: the resources I need and want in pursuing my inner life are not fixed, but vary with so many other things about where I am in my life. But I am very gratified to be here now.
Maybe some are more all-or-nothing about their intellectual and creative life. For me it’s about a viable balance. That’s what I arrived at a long time ago, and I am so fortunate to have found the inner acceptance of my own choices. That task was work, hard work!
It is so hard!!! And I remember being so annoyed with my parents saying things like that to me when I was younger... you will learn with time, be patient and it will come to you... I would think, well, maybe it took YOU time to figure it out but I will figure it out faster. Here I am now knowing and grateful that if I'm lucky, my life will be long enough that eventually I will come to a sense of peace about it all.
I do think that contemporary culture puts a lot of pressure on many of us to achieve a certain level of professional significance that, honestly, is unrealistic and unnecessary. And forces many people to do and say things for publicity, attention and prestige that don't end up serving them in the long term. Guess how I now. 😅
This was a beautiful piece! I'm really excited to pick up On Giving Up—thank you for putting it on my radar.
I finished my Ph.D. program (History) but ultimately decided not to stay in academia. I'm far enough away from it now that I can appreciate and miss all the lovely things about that time, but it was also an incredibly difficult and damaging time for my mental health. When I spend time with friends who are still in the academic world I feel something akin to regret—I really miss the kind of consistent and structured intellectual engagement of my grad program. But I also know that "giving up" on academia was the right decision.
Ultimately, the decision was really a coming to terms with myself. I needed and wanted things that an academic life couldn't offer, and accepting that made the choice to walk away an easy one.
Sending so much love your way. I know how hard that was! And how even when you know you are making the right choice for yourself, it's still hard to let such a big dream go. I think you will really enjoy this book! Let me know what you think if you end up reading it!
Great thoughts, Petya! There can be a lot of wisdom in stepping back and sort of evaluating one’s priorities, instead of stubbornly seeing something through just because you decided you would. It requires a certain self-honesty and vigilance I’m still working to tune.
Thank you, Michael. The self-honesty is the important part. Sometimes it feels hard to know what you want but if you work on self-honesty, clarity follows.
Love the post! So in a very small way this reminded me about how I'm too stubborn to give up reading a book I'm not enjoying. I've been toting it along for months and have barely kept reading. I was sitting today, struggling in this book, and asking myself why I haven't given up on it. I'm not enjoying it. I'm not learning from it.
I realized (and your post helped!) I didn't want to tear down this idea of me as a reader. This book was a favorite for so many, and I felt like I was telling myself I wasn't a reader anymore if I gave up.
It's funny because it's at the crux of the Adam Phillips quote you just shared: am I giving a thing up (the book) or just giving up (me being a reader)? On one end, giving up on the book doesn't diminish my reading. But giving up feels very much like me just letting everyone define me as a reader if I finish this—I hope that made sense!
Completely makes sense and I think my heart skipped a bit when you said, 'am I giving a thing up (the book) or just giving up (me being a reader).' Such a helpful way to reframe that dilemma.
Also, if you read through some of the reader interviews in the archives (and I interview people who are SERIOUS readers), I am pretty sure that every single one of them has said something along the lines of .... if you want to read more, you need to quit more books!!!
Have you read Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought? I don’t agree with everything in it but it gives a lot to think about in terms of the question of how to live an intellectual life
No, but I just looked it up and I will read it. I live in fear that I come across as someone who has a chip on their shoulder or that I am presenting as someone who is more at peace with this as I am. I know we started talking about this a little bit in the chat last week... are you still in academia?
I don’t think you come across at all like you have a chip on your shoulder! (Isn’t it usually people who don’t think they have a chip on their shoulder that do actually have one???) Everyone I know from my postgrad days has/had similar concerns. I think it’s inevitable with the smart v pretty thing you mention. We get encouraged to be smart with the reward of good grades and moving on to the next stage of education. No matter how far you get, that ends sometime. Even completing a PhD comes with a sense of failure: either you leave academia or you struggle to find a place. (It’s an increasingly small number who walk straight into a tenure-track position; maybe they are at peace with themselves!)
I left academia and then fell back into it. By the time I finished the PhD (it’s a 3 year programme in the UK with the possibility of unfunded extension) I hated the academic environment. I worked in student support for a bit and then started working part time (and am now full time) on a teaching only contract at a distance learning institution which has no entry requirements for students as the focus is on qualifications for adults who missed out on HE when they were 18. So I’m conscious that my status in academia is as low as it could be.
Exceptional essay Petya. I am going to get a copy of this book as I think it sounds like something I would enjoy. I also love how towards the end you focus on building learning opportunities for yourself that may not have been viable if you had continued in academia. That thought process works nicely with my own lifelong learning philosophy. Thanks for the insights.
The part that I don't cover in this post is the 18 years that sit between leaving the program and now. That's a story of not giving up on my mind, when I had plenty PLENTY of opportunities to do so.
Reading Phillips is frustrating at times because he just refuses to prescribe solutions, there are no 5 steps to giving up the right way in this book. But I think you would enjoy being in conversation with him. I also got some of his other books that looked interesting. He is very prolific!
This was such a wonderful read. I'm in the fourth year of my PhD program and I contemplate giving up on a weekly basis... I am extremely stubborn by nature, however, and have just a few months left. You've convinced me to get a copy of On Giving Up, thank you for your recommendation and thoughts!
Thank you, Molly! What are you studying and where? I think that in the right program with a good advisor and a good cohort, grad school can feel SO good.... Sadly, many of us are making program choices on very little information when we are entirely too young. When I was still in school, there was an older woman who was taking a bunch of classes in my program and I remember her always being so happy in class and wondered why she would be so chirpy all the time.... I would love to be in grad school now and I would be chirpy too! 😂😂😂
I’m in a geosciences department, studying hydrology! I think for me, the ‘giving up’ feeling is more burnout than anything wrong with the program. I went straight to PhD from undergrad—like you said, entirely too young—and am simply ready to finish school. Soon!
SOON!!! Finish strong!
I think it's also about control. There's a lot that we can't control, but 'giving up' is a choice that we control. And there is power to that.
For sure. In the book Phillips says that a lot of the commonplace advice on why one should not give up is based on the premise that life is always worth living or that things work out. But that's obviously not always true... and people should feel comfortable choosing to let go and, as you said, control their own life.
Interesting, Petya. I have to say I am the exact opposite: I give up on things too easily, perhaps...as soon as something doesn't feel a good fit, regardless of how "good" the opportunity, I walk away. What interests me though is that I experience some of the shame in much the same way, perceiving others' to be "better" than me because they have persevered, despite my husband informing me on numerous occasions that it is one of the qualities he most admires in me- that I instinctively know when to walk away. Huh.
Oh. Phillips would congratulate you for being in touch with your non-compliant, playful side. That's the part of you who helps you feel ALIVE. You are not conforming to personal and cultural ideals of what one should like or do and for how long! I agree with John! This is something to celebrate about yourself!
Ha! Thanks, Petya 💕
Yep. I took an MA and left the program too. But my advisor was very nice about the whole thing and once I moved away from that path I never thought again about being a professor. Though I do still have a hang up about being thought one of the smart ones. Working for years in an academic environment without a PhD by choice did not help matters.
Reading this I did wonder: what if the person who received your email had just validated your choice? Would you have wondered less? Not that there is anything wrong with wondering… And also, I think about what the refusal to be kind and affirming of someone “giving up” says about how those academics really feel about their own choice.
Long live your independent mind!
Abra, the more we talk ... the more I realize we have so much in common. What was your program in? My husband is a PhD and was a professor for several years after I dropped out (he's left academia since, too, for different reasons) and we were in college settings a lot. Being the non-PhDed spouse of an academic was a whole other thing.... Again, not great.
I wonder why nobody said anything to me at the time... and I don't think that their response should matter, I was doing what was good for me... but a kind word on departure would have meant everything to me at the time. I was so young (25 years old) and I think the silence really made me feel a lot of shame that I carried around for years after that.
Long live, indeed. And here's to really pushing against the shame of thinking in public as we do now ... because this feels hard in its own entirely different way.
Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition. My only regret is that, if I did have that degree, I could probably find good work just about anywhere in the world. Right now having options like that might feel good.
You are doing a great job! I can’t say I feel any shame about thinking in public but I do sometimes have to revisit my motives, and remind myself why I am putting all this energy into my newsletter project. Otherwise, signals can be confusing…
I should have specified... my shame is around feelings of not being "rigorous" enough. You can take the girl out of the graduate program, but you can never take the graduate program out of the girl. 🫣
Haha. Well. Like I said, you are doing great. People are engaging because you keep it real. But yes, the cutthroat PTSD is another thing I relate to here. Once two grad colleagues and I took a grad level Antro Ling course that was cross listed and the Anthro students were so mean. One sent an email to the entire class list, thinking it was just to one other student I guess, snarking about my intellect… bitch.
OMG. BITCH INDEED.
May have pointedly slipped “maybe we all need to hear what Mary thinks” into the next discussion…
Also! You have no idea how many people I've told to apply to the PhD program so they can secure the funding and then drop at the MA level if they don't like it 😂😂😂🦹🏻♀️
😂That is the move.
Thanks for a wonderful essay. Useful perspective that can apply to so many things, big and small, significant and petty.
I think as we age it becomes easier to see how much what we used to think was our choice and our pain was actually the pain of succumbing to external pressure and going against ourselves. Phillips is very permissive and I love that about his work.
I relate to this so much in that in the course of accepting the same pretty/smart dichotomy it’s since created paralysis in situations that I find intellectually intimidating and/or know that there’s a chance of intellectual failure. Exhibits A-Z: all the Substack posts in draft! 🫠 These reflections of yours are reframing many, many things for me and I’m going to be chewing this well into the foreseeable. Equally, the silence to those emails is such a dodgy move. Ugh, the hegemony, the hubris!!
Ugh. The paralysis is just real. Because if your aspiration is "to be smart".... you can also never be "smart enough". It's such a hard thing to live with.
When I interviewed Celine Nguyen about her reading life she mentioned reading self-help and a reader commented on how wonderful it was that a smart, intellectual person would admit to it. That comment really struck me because it's 100% true that the intellectual crowd - raised to be certain and confident - laughs at the entire self-help complex. But we probably need it the most. 🫠 indeed.
Let me know if you need an accountability buddy for your Substack!
It's totally a snake eating itself! I also realised that then if you don't get praised then you doubt yourself further? Gah!
That is so great about Celine and I have definitely felt that coming from an intellectual family. Even talking about problems gets put through an intellectual lens that's frustrating because if things aren't articulated properly then they're not accepted.
Thank you so much for the accountability buddy offer ❤️ I'll DM you!
What a nice reflection, you have created a nice space here. I definitely want to read this book! It sounds like it has some great insight, based on what you've shared. I used to have a very black and white view of failure - I dropped out of a master's program after a year. I tried law school after that and hated it and left after a semester because I had a lot of stress in my personal life and wasn't doing well. Both of those made me feel like a failure. But I wasn't even 25 years old! Pretty early on in my adult life, I had to accept these as pivots instead of failures. They were not the right path for me, I just had not found the correct path yet. I read a book several years ago called What Color is Your Parachute? that made me think about "failures" and pivots in a different way too. It is a good career book and my therapist at the time recommended it to me.
Also, I had that same smart versus pretty conversation with myself for most of my life. Maybe only in the last ten years I've realized, oh, I think that I can be both, and many other things. <3
Thank you, Sonya.
I think that the decision of quitting programs feels especially heavy in America where the cost associated with schooling is so insane. I was on a full scholarship at my PhD program and being afraid of losing that was a big factor in struggling with that decision.
This brought tears to my eyes. “Giving up” is such a huge theme for many of us. I see it at some point with every client I’ve ever worked with, and with the client that is myself 😂 it’s part of our personal liberation to challenge what that means. I’ve given up so many things and been pretty relived when I did. The path leading up to it was harrowing as hell but the aftermath, just cruising.
I can imagine... especially in the context of going sober (which I only bring up since you write publicly and so beautifully about your experience).
I grant you full reign to mention it whenever 💛 I had a list of all the things I gave up in my first draft of this comment and drinking was of course on there.
“When you've staked your whole sense of self on academic achievement, walking away feels like watching your identity crumble in real time.” 🥹 this part caught me hard in my feelings this morning. Industry work is no Adorno, either, and the presence of those gaps and feeling unable to bridge them on most days is such a haunting. Thank you for this piece.
Sending so much love your way, friend. I was thinking of you while writing this because in a way -- your sacrifice was even bigger than mine after actually completing the full program. Industry is no Adorno, you are right.
A couple of years ago I worked with a career couch and she told me that basically we have our values and those are fairly static throughout our lives because they are deeply ingrained in us through early childhood and adolescence. And these values inform our needs that can shift somewhat throughout life, based on lived experience. The thing to remember is that YOU are YOU, regardless of what you do in life. And also, you can feel certain needs throughout long periods of your life (let's say, your need for deep intellectual engagement)... but you can absolutely satisfy those needs in different ways. You can get to experience a complete sense of fulfillment and satisfaction... but you need to be open-minded about what that looks like. You also need to drop the ego. That last part is my words, not the coach's.
So much of this resonated with me. Looking back I too have built my identify around being smart vs pretty and I’ve found it hard to cancel, quit, or give up. Thank you for a wonderful article. Looking forward to picking up the book!
"I’ve found it hard to cancel, quit, or give up"... 😭
Same. At some point you start to feel like it's a prison of your own making and you get so much energy out of breaking out of that mindset. But it's such hard work. Even Phillips with all his talk about openness and ambiguity admits that it is hard to separate your conditioning from your true wants, needs and desires.
I relate to this very much. I wanted one thing from early adulthood: the time and freedom to pursue my creative and intellectual life. But that’s not the only thing I wanted. I also wanted not to experience financial stress, to have security including job security, and to have a family, to do honorable stimulating work that in some way benefited others. How can one have everything? Compromises must be made somewhere. As a once-budding neuroscientist, I realized that I didn’t need to be the one making the discoveries; I just wanted to know what they were. The feeling of awe and amazement was more important than doing that work myself. So I made compromises that were good ones for me, allowing a satisfying professional life outside academia, but with enough autonomy and control that I could still feel a (compromised but significant) sense of pursuing my own inner curiosity. Finally I am in a position now to shift the balance away from professional life and toward my inner life. The compromise was not with smart as an identity - I am who I am, pretty firmly - but with how I spend my time and how well it accords with the balance I seek. Which changes over time. That’s part of this whole topic for me: the resources I need and want in pursuing my inner life are not fixed, but vary with so many other things about where I am in my life. But I am very gratified to be here now.
Maybe some are more all-or-nothing about their intellectual and creative life. For me it’s about a viable balance. That’s what I arrived at a long time ago, and I am so fortunate to have found the inner acceptance of my own choices. That task was work, hard work!
It is so hard!!! And I remember being so annoyed with my parents saying things like that to me when I was younger... you will learn with time, be patient and it will come to you... I would think, well, maybe it took YOU time to figure it out but I will figure it out faster. Here I am now knowing and grateful that if I'm lucky, my life will be long enough that eventually I will come to a sense of peace about it all.
I do think that contemporary culture puts a lot of pressure on many of us to achieve a certain level of professional significance that, honestly, is unrealistic and unnecessary. And forces many people to do and say things for publicity, attention and prestige that don't end up serving them in the long term. Guess how I now. 😅
This was a beautiful piece! I'm really excited to pick up On Giving Up—thank you for putting it on my radar.
I finished my Ph.D. program (History) but ultimately decided not to stay in academia. I'm far enough away from it now that I can appreciate and miss all the lovely things about that time, but it was also an incredibly difficult and damaging time for my mental health. When I spend time with friends who are still in the academic world I feel something akin to regret—I really miss the kind of consistent and structured intellectual engagement of my grad program. But I also know that "giving up" on academia was the right decision.
Ultimately, the decision was really a coming to terms with myself. I needed and wanted things that an academic life couldn't offer, and accepting that made the choice to walk away an easy one.
Sending so much love your way. I know how hard that was! And how even when you know you are making the right choice for yourself, it's still hard to let such a big dream go. I think you will really enjoy this book! Let me know what you think if you end up reading it!
Great thoughts, Petya! There can be a lot of wisdom in stepping back and sort of evaluating one’s priorities, instead of stubbornly seeing something through just because you decided you would. It requires a certain self-honesty and vigilance I’m still working to tune.
Thank you, Michael. The self-honesty is the important part. Sometimes it feels hard to know what you want but if you work on self-honesty, clarity follows.
So true. Appreciate the perspective, Petya!
Love the post! So in a very small way this reminded me about how I'm too stubborn to give up reading a book I'm not enjoying. I've been toting it along for months and have barely kept reading. I was sitting today, struggling in this book, and asking myself why I haven't given up on it. I'm not enjoying it. I'm not learning from it.
I realized (and your post helped!) I didn't want to tear down this idea of me as a reader. This book was a favorite for so many, and I felt like I was telling myself I wasn't a reader anymore if I gave up.
It's funny because it's at the crux of the Adam Phillips quote you just shared: am I giving a thing up (the book) or just giving up (me being a reader)? On one end, giving up on the book doesn't diminish my reading. But giving up feels very much like me just letting everyone define me as a reader if I finish this—I hope that made sense!
Completely makes sense and I think my heart skipped a bit when you said, 'am I giving a thing up (the book) or just giving up (me being a reader).' Such a helpful way to reframe that dilemma.
Also, if you read through some of the reader interviews in the archives (and I interview people who are SERIOUS readers), I am pretty sure that every single one of them has said something along the lines of .... if you want to read more, you need to quit more books!!!
Have you read Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought? I don’t agree with everything in it but it gives a lot to think about in terms of the question of how to live an intellectual life
No, but I just looked it up and I will read it. I live in fear that I come across as someone who has a chip on their shoulder or that I am presenting as someone who is more at peace with this as I am. I know we started talking about this a little bit in the chat last week... are you still in academia?
I don’t think you come across at all like you have a chip on your shoulder! (Isn’t it usually people who don’t think they have a chip on their shoulder that do actually have one???) Everyone I know from my postgrad days has/had similar concerns. I think it’s inevitable with the smart v pretty thing you mention. We get encouraged to be smart with the reward of good grades and moving on to the next stage of education. No matter how far you get, that ends sometime. Even completing a PhD comes with a sense of failure: either you leave academia or you struggle to find a place. (It’s an increasingly small number who walk straight into a tenure-track position; maybe they are at peace with themselves!)
I left academia and then fell back into it. By the time I finished the PhD (it’s a 3 year programme in the UK with the possibility of unfunded extension) I hated the academic environment. I worked in student support for a bit and then started working part time (and am now full time) on a teaching only contract at a distance learning institution which has no entry requirements for students as the focus is on qualifications for adults who missed out on HE when they were 18. So I’m conscious that my status in academia is as low as it could be.