For at least a month, I’ve been in a funky mood. I couldn’t tell you what precipitated it, though I’ve got a laundry list of what may or may not have caused it: the holiday season, the winter, collectively pretending the pandemic is over when it doesn’t feel like anything close to “normal”, Mercury and Mars in retrograde, grief, sadness, loneliness and on and on.
Possibly the easiest thing for me to point to is uncertainty about work and what I’m up to in my life. That’s a humbling admission after seven years of doing consulting since leaving academia. I know I have a lot of skills, I’ve done a lot of cool things, I’m good at what I’ve done. It’s just that it can be hard to explain it to people. Heck, it’s hard to explain it to myself.
I imagine I SHOULD know what I’m doing. I have expectations about having my shit together and being able to clearly and succinctly explain what I do and why I do it. My website has stuff on it, I’ve got people who want to work with me. I just don’t really know how to talk about it.
During this time, I’ve finished reading Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks. It’s an excellent read, I recommend it for a refreshing take on productivity culture. At the end of the book Burkeman shares this bit from Carl Jung as he answered a letter from someone asking about the best way to figure out what to do in one’s life. Jung starts by cheekily saying if you want to be told what to do, go to the Catholic Church. Burkeman then quotes Jung’s advice to:
“quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.”
My memory of being a tenure track academic is that I had a never ending list of things to do. That list included all the activities you can imagine to support teaching, research, committees, being a good colleague, being a good family member and community member. I had endless lists.
These days, I have things to accomplish sure - but I have less on the lists. They are more nebulous and weird, like “figure out how to talk to potential clients” or “write stuff”. Yeah I don’t know either.
While Jung says to go to the Catholic Church for certainty, I’d personally replace that with “an institution” (organizational sociologist here - Heyo!). My mom was an Italian Catholic mother who saw her Catholicism as an identity and as something to try to reform from the inside out. She was fine with being a part of the institution, but she wanted it to be better, to change. Also she preferred not to be told what to do and she’d make up her own damn mind. God love her, she was a bit of a rebel.
If I look at my academic time, I thought of myself as a bit of a rebel too. Not an overt rebel, I did my work, I was a good colleague, I did what they told me do inside the academic institution, I’d get the publications or the stuff I was set to do. But I always thought, this system has problems and I’d love to makes some changes.
I believed in changing it from the inside, bringing my own perspective, my sense of how to be compassionate and kind, to do research based on deeply listening to people. I thought I could motivate leadership to care about sustainability. I thought I could work with students to do things differently.
Instead, for a variety of very good reasons, I left the academic system. I’m glad I did and have no regrets about the choice that I made.
The challenge is, when you don’t have a system that tells you what to do and you’ve organized your life around systems that you could subtly rebel against if you’re like me (or excel at/disregard if you’re someone else), you have to find your own system.
My therapist tells me that I’m right on schedule according to Jung, since I’m midlife and going through an individuation process. Stein describes this as the time when moving towards a stage where “The ego now begins to answer to an inner demand and call to obedience from the psyche, rather than primarily to an outer one derived from authorities in society.” (Stein 2006, 211)
However, this individuation process and the releasing of an orientation towards an institution is, in my experience, a total pain in the ass. It is uncomfortable when you’ve spent a long time figuring out how to measure yourself against the things you are “supposed” to do. It’s much harder to figure out what I want to do when it’s not measured externally. What does it look like to do something intrinsic that isn’t neatly lined up with a system?
One path is to find a new institution. For instance, maybe you work for a new organization, support an important cause or connect with a new industry. Maybe you create or forge a new identity beyond what you did before by going back to school to get a new degree or by reconstructing your path. It’s hard work to reconstruct one’s identity and I respect the seeking of a new institution to connect oneself to as a path.
Individuation is (I believe) possible within those identity shifts as well, because when you leave an academic position, you are contending with the challenge of a new way of being which forces you to look at your choices. You must question the institution and what it has told you that you were supposed to do. Regardless of if you were pushed out or left on your own, leaving the institution means you are questioning the institution as a place of value and worth for you.
This also means you need to question your own motivations. And for many of us academics, we had to motivate ourselves through a whole heap of crapola during our grad school years. So it can be very very hard to motivate ourselves when the institution is no longer there giving us a structure to respond to. If I look back to how I motivated myself, it was through responding to the academic system. I wanted to do work that was unique and unusual. When I left, there was no institution to work against, no one telling me that I was unique or unusual. Just… me.
Yet if we return to Burkeman he extends the advice from Jung into what we do in the world. He writes:
“But really, the ‘next and most necessary thing’ is all any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is. Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do.”
This strikes me as simple and yet so profound. What is the next step is a question we may ask ourselves as we make any kind of change or transition (leaving academia, entering midlife etc). In my experience, I almost always feel a tug towards something.
Currently I have an independent research project that is tugging at me as my next step. It’s not something I would ever have done as an academic, I’m not entirely sure what the end product will be with it and yet here I am thinking about something new.
I’ll write more details soon - but for now I’ll say that I’m interviewing people whose work spans multiple fields, groups or disciplines. In academic research, this work is sometimes referred to as “boundary spanning” or being a “bridging tie”. I’m curious about the skills and abilities that folks need in order to do work like this. I am particularly interested in talking to folks who are underrepresented in one or more of the fields they bridge (this can be any under representation e.g. women in STEM, a gay person in industry or a person of color in tech).
If you happen to know someone who would be a good fit for this, could you let me know about them? I’d love to hear.
With care,
Beth