7 ms·

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed s

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help. First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. Second, the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.) I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue. Therapy and medication has only been marginally helpful. I’m really not sure what to do at this point.

fnord77 3y ago
burnout = depression
- tnecniv 3y ago
  You are right, but the hard part for me is determining the causality here. Am I depressed because I’m burnt out, or am I feeling burnt out because I’m depressed?
  - chrisweekly 3y ago
    I suspect treatment will be much the same in either case.
  - bhaney 3y ago
    I usually try to avoid engaging in armchair psychology, but "the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.)" makes me think it's depression causing the burnout rather than the other way around.
- kbf 3y ago
  I thought I was burnt out and just recently found out I had an undiagnosed chronic illness, so that’s a possibility too…
jjtheblunt 3y ago
Not sure it would help, but it may: adopt a rescue animal, if you're a pet oriented person, and don't already have one, and it may jar your perspectives in multiple dimensions as to what is fun, what is entertaining, what is meaningful. That worked for me when i felt like you describe.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  I do love animals, but I’ve always been intimidated about the responsibility of being the person solely in charge of that animal’s life. I’ve always struggled with routines and such (I found out in adulthood I have ADHD). I have thought about it lately, though. Maybe having that responsibility will cause other things to click into place? However, I’m worried about it not working and impacting a life beyond my own.
  - janussunaj 3y ago
    Your concern is more of a sign that you'd be a responsible pet parent. I don't have experience with dogs (rescue or not), but caring for a cat is relatively straightforward and can bring lots of joy. Writing this with a cat sleeping on my lap, who showed up in my backyard a few years ago.
    - jjtheblunt 3y ago
      Caring for two cats is even easier because if their human is boring because of concentration, they can entertain each other. Works here, and with rescue dog in the mix too. Also, if the dog is fond of walks and hikes etc, that’s possibly super healthy for a break from sitting and working. As the joke goes, "Ask me how I know." :)
- earthling8118 3y ago
  Only do this if you're serious. Depending on the animal you could very well just add another negative thing to your life. There are upsides, sure, but there's nothing that feels great about walking into your bedroom and getting a nasty look from an animal you put hours upon hours of work in per week for because they don't like humans.
scrapcode 3y ago
Man, I feel you. I'm not an academic, but I'm just feeling out of breath and defeated lately. I grew up loving to build software. Reading programming books, keeping up with tech. It's the closest thing to work + passion that I think I've ever felt. Joined the military to get out of my hometown. Worked in whatever field I could remotely relate to while I finished my BS:CS. Moved from non-IT fields into whatever IT-related field I could hoping it'd get my resume closer to what I wanted to do. Now I'm just pigeon-holed into some boring bureaucratic IT admin gig with just enough perks to keep me around, and big enough dollar signs to prevent me from starting over in a junior capacity. Then I see all of the discussions from people that don't enjoy development after just a short time, get laid off, etc - and it makes the reality that I'm just destined to rot bored to death for 40hrs a week for the next 25+ years all the more real. I also realize I am extremely fortunate compared to plenty of others, but that "tug" telling me I was destined for much more gets stronger the older I get.
- mikub 3y ago
  I think that one of the problems of us humans is that we want to accomplish something, we tell our self storys about our self how we should have become that or done that. But in the end it really doesn't matter, even if you were Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman or Marie Curie, in a few billion years none of all the work any human ever did, everything accomplished, won't matter, no one will be here to remember anymore. I think the best one can do is to look at this world with some sort of an observer mindset and be curious about the things happening in this world, try not to judge the things happening, just think "Oh, that's interesting, I wonder why it is like that.". And of course, always try to be friendly to other living beings, even if there might be no afterlife after the end of the universe and you can't trade in your browniepoints anymore, ther is no excuse for making other peoples life worse than it already is. ;)
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  That's the alarm system telling you to wake up and start looking around for a change. For whatever reason, we seem to have a meta-cognitive system that watches for stagnation and creates unease when it is detected. Am convinced that you can't disable it entirely, but you can self-mediate or ignore it. Either route is not great, as you're aware on some level that you're refusing your destiny (of sorts). I think about this quote a lot: "i keep re-encountering with a shock the way that most people do not know, at all, that the problem the entire universe is devoted to, that it crashes us into walls, throws us off cliffs, tortures and murders us to try to solve, is that of escaping local maxima" - https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1248861223501942784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=sonyasupposedly.com https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1248861223501942784?re... Thus, I'd implore you to stick with the feeling and use it as impetus to change for something new.
nsagent 3y ago
I'm in a similar boat. Not a postdoc yet, but will be starting a postdoc in July (assuming I graduate in May, which I'm on track for). I've always been interested in the intersection of AI and interactive storytelling. Worked in the game industry for a while, then came back for a PhD when ML really started taking off. With the current frenzied climate in NLP research, I just feel demotivated. Mainly because I think my research outlook is very different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets undervalued or ignored entirely. I spent over a year and a half on my last published research project [1], and it's been largely ignored. Despite having strong reviews after rebuttal, the paper was relegated to the Findings of EMNLP, likely because my research was video game related. I'm usually the kind of person that focuses on things because I care about them, rather than because others do, but the reality is that hiring decisions in academia (or even industry) require that others value your work. If I truly thought I could do research I cared about and get paid a living, without having to worry about whether others accepted it, I think I'd be much more motivated. [1]: https://pl.aiwright.dev https://pl.aiwright.dev My site is a static site hosted on sourcehut, which is having an outage. If it's still down, try https://web.archive.org/web/20240110040908/https://pl.aiwright.dev/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240110040908/https://pl.aiwrig...
- tnecniv 3y ago
  I started my postdoc in August, but the burnout started earlier, a few months before writing my dissertation. Congrats on finishing your degree (almost)! I also have kind of esoteric interests in my field but it mostly hasn’t bothered me. It certainly doesn’t help with matters though when sometimes I’m trying to motivate myself and go “what’s the point?” I will say that one thing I’ve learned as a researcher is that it’s hard to know what people will and will not like. I’ve received compliments on some of my least favorite papers I’ve written. My advisor always told this story about how, as a student, he won a best paper award for a paper that almost decided not to publish because they thought the results weren’t strong enough.
- godelski 3y ago
  > Mainly because I think my research outlook is very different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets undervalued or ignored entirely. You're not alone. One of my first papers was in normalizing flows and I focused on a niche area in there (if I said, I'd dox myself. Even this limits the search a lot). Reviewers came back and asked why my images weren't as good as SOTA GANs and just rejected. Half my experiments were on density estimation... The other reviews said I should be applying my methods to GANs instead, but that wasn't even possible because I was explicitly exploiting the distributional properties at each flow step. My most cited paper is unpublished and the reviews I got back were about why someone would want to train from scratch instead of tuning a large model. Why we cared about such things as small number of parameters or how to quickly train models without overfitting because "bigger models generalize better." Fwiw, I'd have no issue accepting your work. It looks useful, it advances domain knowledge, and is clearly written. I think a lot of people lose sight that experiments are proxies and that the tools we are working with are more general than the specific applications we demonstrate.
flatline 3y ago
Academia is a recipe for burnout. It’s like pro sports, unless you are the top 1% of the top 1% you may be able to keep eeking by but will never be in a comfortable position. There is always more to do and you do not get paid well for your time. You are surrounded by people who pour their lives into their work and it will be expected of you. The culture is extremely toxic and dysfunctional. Your lack of imagination as to another job is part of the trap. Work can be enjoyable, pay well, and you can still have a personal life, but academia sells itself as the only possible trajectory for a certain type of person. Most people leave academia and many of them find meaningful work outside of that.
- nextos 3y ago
  The problem in Academia is that its too crowded. With crowding, in many fields, the de facto way to progress has become to play corridor and department politics. I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted. Some fields are more prone to this kind of behavior and power structures than others. Plus, in the past, it was much easier for recent PhD graduates to progress to tenure-track positions, without needing to do a postdoc (or many!) in between. Actually, some countries have established regulations to try to prevent postdoc abuse, as faculty is typically interested in getting them to do all work, giving them little credit, etc. Some of my postdoc friends were supervising students, designing studies, and writing grants but their names were never officially on paper! Their PI used this as a way to getting them trapped. Without e.g. supervision experience, they would not be able to move to tenure-track positions, thereby getting stuck with him (as cheap labor) forever.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted. I've seen this, and it's happened to me. I'm at a much lower ranking uni and we partner with higher ranking unis and I can tell you that I know quite a number of people at top 5 universities that do not know what an expectation value, probability density, or covariance is. They get attached to my papers but I do not get attached to their papers, even if I put in more work than the reverse situation (I can't tell you what some of my coauthors did). I wrote an entire NSF grant, that we won, and my advisor told me I only played a small role. Even if true, that should be a red flag that the system is broken. Why is this so much about politics? What we're seeing is the meritocracy-metric paradox. Where metrics are literally the biggest killers of any meritocracies. Every metric can be hacked and the more reliance you place upon them, the more they will be. The problem is people think metrics perfectly align with objectives and that this alignment is static throughout time. Neither of those is true and it is baffling to me that people either aren't willing to admit it or are willing to and then just continue as if it didn't. The world is fuzzy and metrics are just guides. I thought the difference between humans and machines was that we could generalize instructions to the intent and not the letter.
bee_rider 3y ago
I think this is something… I dunno, it ought to be obvious, but maybe we miss it in the general public? The tenure system is partially there because it is actually good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and play with problems. And good ideas have the element of play. If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow…
- godelski 3y ago
  > The tenure system is partially there because it is actually good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and play with problems. The tenure system doesn't work like most people think it does. It is not "I made it, now I can just do whatever I want without getting fired." You still have publication quotas and you end up having more bureaucratic work. Even with all the admins that schools have hired, there is just more work for professors. > If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow… And? The world in complex. Simplicity is the goal, but it is the simplest description that also adequately explains the thing. That's not going to end up being very simple and there's a reason you see physicists learning very complex mathematics. It should absolutely make sense that complexity takes over as we advance our knowledge as a species because the simple things are easier to understand and are understood first. If things are not getting more complex over time, that's a sign that we are either really fucking dumb (having missed many simple things) or that we simply understand things with higher resolution. Simplicity is for the Luddites (this is literally a key part of that history).
godelski 3y ago
I'm in a similar position. At the end of my PhD I feel like I want to drop out. I do ML research and I just lost faith in the academic system. Research is my absolute favorite thing to do but everything else surrounding it I just absolutely hate and it feels draining and worthless. Ideas get dismissed without explanations (even after asking), publication process is incredibly noisy and when you get a nonsensical review (I can share) people just say "shit happens" or "weird" and then it happens again and again, and advisors and managers want weekly updates but visible progress in a project goes through wild cycles of lots of work with little to nothing to show vs low work where it looks like lots of progress is made (e.g. tuning models). It just feels like hell. I'm always thinking about my projects because they sincerely interest and captivate me but I feel like the systems we have built around what is entirely a creative process is structured for routine work. I'm being asked to do things that have never been done before -- and I love this, it is the ultimate puzzle -- but how the fuck do you expect me to give accurate ETAs and to do this 3-5 times a year and launch ground breaking work with some 2080Ti nodes and maybe one A100 node? How ground breaking of work can it be if it is done in a few months? I am supposed to do this by myself and compete against a team of Google engineers? This publish or perish paradigm is absolute bullshit and we're at a point where fucking Nvidia asked for a new PhD to have 8 top conference 1st author publications. Therapy and medication definitely help, and I were I not to start them I, without a doubt, would have dropped out. But I think we need to have a very serious discussion about the systems that we have in place and how we're continually shooting ourselves in the foot with this fucking rat race. Maybe I'm just a bad researcher, because it does seem that there are a lot of highly successful people. But if I'm being honest, when I talk to those people I can't see anything that they are doing different other than opportunities/resources and possibly better mentoring. There are of course people that stand out and I can definitely see their genius when talking to them, but for the vast majority of researchers I really can't tell what makes the difference between making it and breaking it. I can't tell what makes a paper work and not work. I really just want to spend my days reading math books, hacking away at ML systems, and trying to understand what this whole thing around consciousness, intelligence, and sentience is. But I don't know how to make this life. It isn't academia and it isn't industry. So how do I be born rich? Can we get to post scarcity yet?
- nsagent 3y ago
thefaux 3y ago
Before I left academia, I felt that I would be a terrible failure. The people I was surrounded by looked at leaving the academy as a sad admission of defeat. In retrospect, I think this was largely a reflection of their own insecurity and lack of perspective because most had never been outside of the academic bubble. Life on the outside is different. Having been gone over a decade, there are some things I miss and that are definitely hard to find in other environments. On the other hand, I feel immeasurably better about myself not having to beg to toil away on projects of questionable significance that happen to have funding and be stuck in the precarity of borderline poverty in the service of supposedly higher ideals.
- max_ 3y ago
  What things do you miss in academia that you didn't find in industry?
- Aeolun 3y ago
  It’s quite telling that you never see people in industry long for their time in academia.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    Eh I think there’s a good chance they’re less vocal about it. My father is a lawyer and he chose between going into a legal career and doing a PhD in philosophy. If you asked him, he’d tell you he wished he didn’t latter now that he’s nearing the end of his legal career. I think that 1) there’s a smaller percentage of people that made the choice between academics and industry and chose industry 2) they’re not vocal about it for one reason or the other. Most of the people I went to undergrad with whom I thought could succeed in academia had zero interest in doing research at any level. Academia is definitely not for everyone, but when I weighed my options I am happy I did my PhD regardless of how I feel at the moment. It’s a peculiar thing for peculiar people and the attraction does not correlate with intelligence.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      That may be true, but here it concerns people that have never gone into academia at all? I think having done it is important, otherwise you just have the regret, but people with experience in academia already, never seem to long for those days after moving to industry. At least I haven’t heard of any.
academic_tmp22 3y ago
As academic with the tenure job, I don't think it gets easier with the tenure -- you'll have to do more non-research stuff, admin, teaching, supervisions, grading, grant writing etc. (some people like it, but I just prefer research) I do have burn-out certainly that appeared after I had a faculty job for a few years. That mostly has affected my overtime research work, which previously would take most of my free-time, but now I try to spend more of my free time on hobbies. My advice is that unless you can overcome burnout somehow, not to try tenure positions in the states, because there you'll have to work really hard to get to tenure. I think positions in Europe tend to be often tenured from the beginning (i.e. UK) so it may be easier. (throwaway account)
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Yeah I’m not sure I’d go the tenure route anyway. I’d rather do research than manage people doing research on my half-baked ideas. Fortunately, in my field, there’s options to publish as an industry research. Unfortunately, those jobs dried up last year along with all the other tech jobs when I was searching. I guess the tricky thing (maybe it suggests it’s not burnout but some other source of depression) is that I haven’t been motivated by my hobbies either. It’s been hard to find much joy in anything as of late.
borroka 3y ago
> First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. I suspect there are many jobs you would do, but you have to allow yourself to let go of the dreams, the ambitions, the identity you have built in academia. A few years ago, almost seven, I decided to leave academia, after a PhD and many years as a post doc, more than 50 journal papers published, awards and recognition in my field. I loved doing research, writing papers and thinking about the new advances I would make. Why the change of mind and career? First, it seemed that my time as a researcher had passed, and that I was becoming an old postdoc with little appeal to universities and research institutions. Second, I was growing tired of earning little money. Third, it was beginning to look like I was doing similar research to what I was doing 5 years earlier, and I had a feeling that it would be the same research I would be doing 5 years down the road. I started interviewing for positions in (tech) industry, got a monetary offer 5 times what I was making as a senior postdoc, started a new career, and never looked back. The last part is not entirely true. At times, I look back and regret the last 5 years I spent in academia. I could have had a faster career in tech, earned much more money, and would have met bright and motivated people sooner. The world is full of interesting technical problems that need to be solved.
- etrautmann 3y ago
  This is true for a surprisingly large number of people. It's very easy to lose time in a post doc that's not either fun science or advancing your career in a high ROI way. Many post docs don't have the experience and diversity of perspective required to recognize this trap, and nobody around them is incentivized to help. This is true whether you're planning to stay in academia or not.
  - borroka 3y ago
    This is one of the reasons I stopped informally mentoring postdocs. It was an exercise in frustration. It was like telling someone who had only had one husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend in their life (and now has left or is leaving) that there were many other people in the world with whom they could have been as happy as they were with their ex (willy-nilly), and even much happier, if only they had allowed themselves to experience their new world. "They (the research/partner) are all I have loved in my life," "I can't imagine myself with anyone else/with any other job." The arguments were remarkably similar and equally frustrating to deal with.
dexwiz 3y ago
I think there is a kind of grief associated with growing up that people don’t talk about. When you are young and inspired it seems like life is long and you can do anything, branching paths with unlimited doors. Once you're an adult, your past choices narrow down your future paths, and your sense of age starts to set in. In some way you mourn the paths not taken. This is called mortality, and can be a nasty combo with other depressive factors. As you get older, you realize some doors not yet stepped through are now closed, and less doors are opened by others for you. Life can start to feel like a hallway with the investable at the end. While less doors are open now, life is still very free. You may now be able to see decades into your past, but you still cannot see into your future. There are many open doors still hidden, they just take a bit more searching. Good news, you are an adult with years of life experience, you can go find them.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Coincidentally, I was rewatching the first season of True Detective last night and they were talking about this in the show. I almost turned it off because it was too real for me at the moment.
- weakfish 3y ago
  I just wanted to say thank you for this comment, it helped a lot of with some general anxieties plaguing me lately.
- wnolens 3y ago
  I need a support group for this idea. Can't seem to accept it and walk through some doors, abandoning the other paths. It's sparked a major depression in me.
- marssaxman 3y ago
  As I have grown older I have come to see a similar effect not just in my own life but in the shape of the world around us; humanity has closed the doors to certain kinds of futures I once hoped and worked for, and "mourning" is a good term for those feelings. There are many open doors remaining in humanity's future, to be sure, but the scope of change seems narrower than it once did, since the bright new possibilities of the future always seem to get swallowed up by the ugly messes left over from the past.
bdowling 3y ago
You could try going on an adventure, ideally a real one that is a little bit dangerous.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  That does always seem to work in the movies
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
TimPC 3y ago
As someone who initially started my career in academia I've been much happier since leaving. There are opportunities across industrial R&D that are far saner in terms of compensation and while they are slightly more restrictive in terms of what you work on there are still chances to do interesting research.
- godelski 3y ago
  There definitely are, but to be honest, my passion is research at low TRL. Industry is saner, but they necessarily work at a higher TRL because they are not just profit motivated, but need to make profits from your research in 6 months to 3 years.
deleted 3y ago
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0x3444ac53 3y ago
Personally, I never made it very far in academia. Never even finished out undergrad. That said, I'm now at a point in my life where I'm mostly surrounded by Businesses Majors and I do truly miss my time as a philosophy student, despite being very burnt out when I left. Academia is a weird field, that, in my experience, is wonderful to have connections to, but for the most part is exhausting. Frankly I think things can be more exhausting when you love them enough to be consumed by them. Even now, I have projects that I work on in my free time that I'm so engaged and miss sleep for, and while I'm proud of whatever is produced, it does often lead me feeling frustrated and burnt out. It helped me quite a bit to start setting boundaries for myself, as in: I'm going to work on this project until this time, and then I'm taking time to disconnect from it. Even though it can be frustrating to interrupt a flow state, it's still important to take care of ones own needs.
galdosdi 3y ago
> I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help. It might help a lot by giving you a break from thinking about the kinds of things you currently think about a lot. Seriously consider it. You don't know what you don't know. Perspective helps. > First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. Not relevant -- you can come back to research later, and when you're burn out or depressed you inherently have a hard time imagining how new things could be fun > I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue. Well, as a researcher you can appreciate that there is one way to find out -- experiment. But if it started with work and later spread, work probably had a lot to do with it. Besides, burnout is really common in academia.
naveen99 3y ago
There are a couple of approaches to life I have used at various times: 1. Have fun. Limit productive activities to 2 hrs a day. 2. Go all out on a new idea. Succeed or fail. If there is no risk of failure, you are really in mode 1. 2 is only possibly for short bursts, upto 1-2 weeks. if you feel burnt out, it’s time for zone 1 for sure.
emeril 3y ago
not all meds are the same for everyone - maybe try an maoi like emsam - helped me a bunch with that feeling to varying degrees, jobs are what you make of it rather than what it makes of you

fnord77 3y ago

burnout = depression

tnecniv 3y ago
You are right, but the hard part for me is determining the causality here. Am I depressed because I’m burnt out, or am I feeling burnt out because I’m depressed?
- chrisweekly 3y ago
  I suspect treatment will be much the same in either case.
- bhaney 3y ago
  I usually try to avoid engaging in armchair psychology, but "the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.)" makes me think it's depression causing the burnout rather than the other way around.
kbf 3y ago
I thought I was burnt out and just recently found out I had an undiagnosed chronic illness, so that’s a possibility too…

jjtheblunt 3y ago

Not sure it would help, but it may: adopt a rescue animal, if you're a pet oriented person, and don't already have one, and it may jar your perspectives in multiple dimensions as to what is fun, what is entertaining, what is meaningful. That worked for me when i felt like you describe.

tnecniv 3y ago
I do love animals, but I’ve always been intimidated about the responsibility of being the person solely in charge of that animal’s life. I’ve always struggled with routines and such (I found out in adulthood I have ADHD). I have thought about it lately, though. Maybe having that responsibility will cause other things to click into place? However, I’m worried about it not working and impacting a life beyond my own.
- janussunaj 3y ago
  Your concern is more of a sign that you'd be a responsible pet parent. I don't have experience with dogs (rescue or not), but caring for a cat is relatively straightforward and can bring lots of joy. Writing this with a cat sleeping on my lap, who showed up in my backyard a few years ago.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    Caring for two cats is even easier because if their human is boring because of concentration, they can entertain each other. Works here, and with rescue dog in the mix too. Also, if the dog is fond of walks and hikes etc, that’s possibly super healthy for a break from sitting and working. As the joke goes, "Ask me how I know." :)
earthling8118 3y ago
Only do this if you're serious. Depending on the animal you could very well just add another negative thing to your life. There are upsides, sure, but there's nothing that feels great about walking into your bedroom and getting a nasty look from an animal you put hours upon hours of work in per week for because they don't like humans.

scrapcode 3y ago

Man, I feel you. I'm not an academic, but I'm just feeling out of breath and defeated lately. I grew up loving to build software. Reading programming books, keeping up with tech. It's the closest thing to work + passion that I think I've ever felt. Joined the military to get out of my hometown. Worked in whatever field I could remotely relate to while I finished my BS:CS. Moved from non-IT fields into whatever IT-related field I could hoping it'd get my resume closer to what I wanted to do. Now I'm just pigeon-holed into some boring bureaucratic IT admin gig with just enough perks to keep me around, and big enough dollar signs to prevent me from starting over in a junior capacity. Then I see all of the discussions from people that don't enjoy development after just a short time, get laid off, etc - and it makes the reality that I'm just destined to rot bored to death for 40hrs a week for the next 25+ years all the more real. I also realize I am extremely fortunate compared to plenty of others, but that "tug" telling me I was destined for much more gets stronger the older I get.

mikub 3y ago
I think that one of the problems of us humans is that we want to accomplish something, we tell our self storys about our self how we should have become that or done that. But in the end it really doesn't matter, even if you were Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman or Marie Curie, in a few billion years none of all the work any human ever did, everything accomplished, won't matter, no one will be here to remember anymore. I think the best one can do is to look at this world with some sort of an observer mindset and be curious about the things happening in this world, try not to judge the things happening, just think "Oh, that's interesting, I wonder why it is like that.". And of course, always try to be friendly to other living beings, even if there might be no afterlife after the end of the universe and you can't trade in your browniepoints anymore, ther is no excuse for making other peoples life worse than it already is. ;)
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
That's the alarm system telling you to wake up and start looking around for a change. For whatever reason, we seem to have a meta-cognitive system that watches for stagnation and creates unease when it is detected. Am convinced that you can't disable it entirely, but you can self-mediate or ignore it. Either route is not great, as you're aware on some level that you're refusing your destiny (of sorts). I think about this quote a lot: "i keep re-encountering with a shock the way that most people do not know, at all, that the problem the entire universe is devoted to, that it crashes us into walls, throws us off cliffs, tortures and murders us to try to solve, is that of escaping local maxima" - https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1248861223501942784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=sonyasupposedly.com https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1248861223501942784?re... Thus, I'd implore you to stick with the feeling and use it as impetus to change for something new.

nsagent 3y ago

I'm in a similar boat. Not a postdoc yet, but will be starting a postdoc in July (assuming I graduate in May, which I'm on track for). I've always been interested in the intersection of AI and interactive storytelling. Worked in the game industry for a while, then came back for a PhD when ML really started taking off. With the current frenzied climate in NLP research, I just feel demotivated. Mainly because I think my research outlook is very different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets undervalued or ignored entirely. I spent over a year and a half on my last published research project [1], and it's been largely ignored. Despite having strong reviews after rebuttal, the paper was relegated to the Findings of EMNLP, likely because my research was video game related. I'm usually the kind of person that focuses on things because I care about them, rather than because others do, but the reality is that hiring decisions in academia (or even industry) require that others value your work. If I truly thought I could do research I cared about and get paid a living, without having to worry about whether others accepted it, I think I'd be much more motivated. [1]: https://pl.aiwright.dev https://pl.aiwright.dev My site is a static site hosted on sourcehut, which is having an outage. If it's still down, try https://web.archive.org/web/20240110040908/https://pl.aiwright.dev/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240110040908/https://pl.aiwrig...

tnecniv 3y ago
I started my postdoc in August, but the burnout started earlier, a few months before writing my dissertation. Congrats on finishing your degree (almost)! I also have kind of esoteric interests in my field but it mostly hasn’t bothered me. It certainly doesn’t help with matters though when sometimes I’m trying to motivate myself and go “what’s the point?” I will say that one thing I’ve learned as a researcher is that it’s hard to know what people will and will not like. I’ve received compliments on some of my least favorite papers I’ve written. My advisor always told this story about how, as a student, he won a best paper award for a paper that almost decided not to publish because they thought the results weren’t strong enough.
godelski 3y ago
> Mainly because I think my research outlook is very different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets undervalued or ignored entirely. You're not alone. One of my first papers was in normalizing flows and I focused on a niche area in there (if I said, I'd dox myself. Even this limits the search a lot). Reviewers came back and asked why my images weren't as good as SOTA GANs and just rejected. Half my experiments were on density estimation... The other reviews said I should be applying my methods to GANs instead, but that wasn't even possible because I was explicitly exploiting the distributional properties at each flow step. My most cited paper is unpublished and the reviews I got back were about why someone would want to train from scratch instead of tuning a large model. Why we cared about such things as small number of parameters or how to quickly train models without overfitting because "bigger models generalize better." Fwiw, I'd have no issue accepting your work. It looks useful, it advances domain knowledge, and is clearly written. I think a lot of people lose sight that experiments are proxies and that the tools we are working with are more general than the specific applications we demonstrate.

flatline 3y ago

Academia is a recipe for burnout. It’s like pro sports, unless you are the top 1% of the top 1% you may be able to keep eeking by but will never be in a comfortable position. There is always more to do and you do not get paid well for your time. You are surrounded by people who pour their lives into their work and it will be expected of you. The culture is extremely toxic and dysfunctional. Your lack of imagination as to another job is part of the trap. Work can be enjoyable, pay well, and you can still have a personal life, but academia sells itself as the only possible trajectory for a certain type of person. Most people leave academia and many of them find meaningful work outside of that.

nextos 3y ago
The problem in Academia is that its too crowded. With crowding, in many fields, the de facto way to progress has become to play corridor and department politics. I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted. Some fields are more prone to this kind of behavior and power structures than others. Plus, in the past, it was much easier for recent PhD graduates to progress to tenure-track positions, without needing to do a postdoc (or many!) in between. Actually, some countries have established regulations to try to prevent postdoc abuse, as faculty is typically interested in getting them to do all work, giving them little credit, etc. Some of my postdoc friends were supervising students, designing studies, and writing grants but their names were never officially on paper! Their PI used this as a way to getting them trapped. Without e.g. supervision experience, they would not be able to move to tenure-track positions, thereby getting stuck with him (as cheap labor) forever.
- godelski 3y ago
  > I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted. I've seen this, and it's happened to me. I'm at a much lower ranking uni and we partner with higher ranking unis and I can tell you that I know quite a number of people at top 5 universities that do not know what an expectation value, probability density, or covariance is. They get attached to my papers but I do not get attached to their papers, even if I put in more work than the reverse situation (I can't tell you what some of my coauthors did). I wrote an entire NSF grant, that we won, and my advisor told me I only played a small role. Even if true, that should be a red flag that the system is broken. Why is this so much about politics? What we're seeing is the meritocracy-metric paradox. Where metrics are literally the biggest killers of any meritocracies. Every metric can be hacked and the more reliance you place upon them, the more they will be. The problem is people think metrics perfectly align with objectives and that this alignment is static throughout time. Neither of those is true and it is baffling to me that people either aren't willing to admit it or are willing to and then just continue as if it didn't. The world is fuzzy and metrics are just guides. I thought the difference between humans and machines was that we could generalize instructions to the intent and not the letter.

bee_rider 3y ago

I think this is something… I dunno, it ought to be obvious, but maybe we miss it in the general public? The tenure system is partially there because it is actually good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and play with problems. And good ideas have the element of play. If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow…

godelski 3y ago
> The tenure system is partially there because it is actually good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and play with problems. The tenure system doesn't work like most people think it does. It is not "I made it, now I can just do whatever I want without getting fired." You still have publication quotas and you end up having more bureaucratic work. Even with all the admins that schools have hired, there is just more work for professors. > If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow… And? The world in complex. Simplicity is the goal, but it is the simplest description that also adequately explains the thing. That's not going to end up being very simple and there's a reason you see physicists learning very complex mathematics. It should absolutely make sense that complexity takes over as we advance our knowledge as a species because the simple things are easier to understand and are understood first. If things are not getting more complex over time, that's a sign that we are either really fucking dumb (having missed many simple things) or that we simply understand things with higher resolution. Simplicity is for the Luddites (this is literally a key part of that history).

godelski 3y ago

I'm in a similar position. At the end of my PhD I feel like I want to drop out. I do ML research and I just lost faith in the academic system. Research is my absolute favorite thing to do but everything else surrounding it I just absolutely hate and it feels draining and worthless. Ideas get dismissed without explanations (even after asking), publication process is incredibly noisy and when you get a nonsensical review (I can share) people just say "shit happens" or "weird" and then it happens again and again, and advisors and managers want weekly updates but visible progress in a project goes through wild cycles of lots of work with little to nothing to show vs low work where it looks like lots of progress is made (e.g. tuning models). It just feels like hell. I'm always thinking about my projects because they sincerely interest and captivate me but I feel like the systems we have built around what is entirely a creative process is structured for routine work. I'm being asked to do things that have never been done before -- and I love this, it is the ultimate puzzle -- but how the fuck do you expect me to give accurate ETAs and to do this 3-5 times a year and launch ground breaking work with some 2080Ti nodes and maybe one A100 node? How ground breaking of work can it be if it is done in a few months? I am supposed to do this by myself and compete against a team of Google engineers? This publish or perish paradigm is absolute bullshit and we're at a point where fucking Nvidia asked for a new PhD to have 8 top conference 1st author publications. Therapy and medication definitely help, and I were I not to start them I, without a doubt, would have dropped out. But I think we need to have a very serious discussion about the systems that we have in place and how we're continually shooting ourselves in the foot with this fucking rat race. Maybe I'm just a bad researcher, because it does seem that there are a lot of highly successful people. But if I'm being honest, when I talk to those people I can't see anything that they are doing different other than opportunities/resources and possibly better mentoring. There are of course people that stand out and I can definitely see their genius when talking to them, but for the vast majority of researchers I really can't tell what makes the difference between making it and breaking it. I can't tell what makes a paper work and not work. I really just want to spend my days reading math books, hacking away at ML systems, and trying to understand what this whole thing around consciousness, intelligence, and sentience is. But I don't know how to make this life. It isn't academia and it isn't industry. So how do I be born rich? Can we get to post scarcity yet?

nsagent 3y ago

thefaux 3y ago

Before I left academia, I felt that I would be a terrible failure. The people I was surrounded by looked at leaving the academy as a sad admission of defeat. In retrospect, I think this was largely a reflection of their own insecurity and lack of perspective because most had never been outside of the academic bubble. Life on the outside is different. Having been gone over a decade, there are some things I miss and that are definitely hard to find in other environments. On the other hand, I feel immeasurably better about myself not having to beg to toil away on projects of questionable significance that happen to have funding and be stuck in the precarity of borderline poverty in the service of supposedly higher ideals.

max_ 3y ago
What things do you miss in academia that you didn't find in industry?
Aeolun 3y ago
It’s quite telling that you never see people in industry long for their time in academia.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Eh I think there’s a good chance they’re less vocal about it. My father is a lawyer and he chose between going into a legal career and doing a PhD in philosophy. If you asked him, he’d tell you he wished he didn’t latter now that he’s nearing the end of his legal career. I think that 1) there’s a smaller percentage of people that made the choice between academics and industry and chose industry 2) they’re not vocal about it for one reason or the other. Most of the people I went to undergrad with whom I thought could succeed in academia had zero interest in doing research at any level. Academia is definitely not for everyone, but when I weighed my options I am happy I did my PhD regardless of how I feel at the moment. It’s a peculiar thing for peculiar people and the attraction does not correlate with intelligence.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    That may be true, but here it concerns people that have never gone into academia at all? I think having done it is important, otherwise you just have the regret, but people with experience in academia already, never seem to long for those days after moving to industry. At least I haven’t heard of any.

academic_tmp22 3y ago

As academic with the tenure job, I don't think it gets easier with the tenure -- you'll have to do more non-research stuff, admin, teaching, supervisions, grading, grant writing etc. (some people like it, but I just prefer research) I do have burn-out certainly that appeared after I had a faculty job for a few years. That mostly has affected my overtime research work, which previously would take most of my free-time, but now I try to spend more of my free time on hobbies. My advice is that unless you can overcome burnout somehow, not to try tenure positions in the states, because there you'll have to work really hard to get to tenure. I think positions in Europe tend to be often tenured from the beginning (i.e. UK) so it may be easier. (throwaway account)

tnecniv 3y ago
Yeah I’m not sure I’d go the tenure route anyway. I’d rather do research than manage people doing research on my half-baked ideas. Fortunately, in my field, there’s options to publish as an industry research. Unfortunately, those jobs dried up last year along with all the other tech jobs when I was searching. I guess the tricky thing (maybe it suggests it’s not burnout but some other source of depression) is that I haven’t been motivated by my hobbies either. It’s been hard to find much joy in anything as of late.

borroka 3y ago

> First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. I suspect there are many jobs you would do, but you have to allow yourself to let go of the dreams, the ambitions, the identity you have built in academia. A few years ago, almost seven, I decided to leave academia, after a PhD and many years as a post doc, more than 50 journal papers published, awards and recognition in my field. I loved doing research, writing papers and thinking about the new advances I would make. Why the change of mind and career? First, it seemed that my time as a researcher had passed, and that I was becoming an old postdoc with little appeal to universities and research institutions. Second, I was growing tired of earning little money. Third, it was beginning to look like I was doing similar research to what I was doing 5 years earlier, and I had a feeling that it would be the same research I would be doing 5 years down the road. I started interviewing for positions in (tech) industry, got a monetary offer 5 times what I was making as a senior postdoc, started a new career, and never looked back. The last part is not entirely true. At times, I look back and regret the last 5 years I spent in academia. I could have had a faster career in tech, earned much more money, and would have met bright and motivated people sooner. The world is full of interesting technical problems that need to be solved.

etrautmann 3y ago
This is true for a surprisingly large number of people. It's very easy to lose time in a post doc that's not either fun science or advancing your career in a high ROI way. Many post docs don't have the experience and diversity of perspective required to recognize this trap, and nobody around them is incentivized to help. This is true whether you're planning to stay in academia or not.
- borroka 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons I stopped informally mentoring postdocs. It was an exercise in frustration. It was like telling someone who had only had one husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend in their life (and now has left or is leaving) that there were many other people in the world with whom they could have been as happy as they were with their ex (willy-nilly), and even much happier, if only they had allowed themselves to experience their new world. "They (the research/partner) are all I have loved in my life," "I can't imagine myself with anyone else/with any other job." The arguments were remarkably similar and equally frustrating to deal with.

dexwiz 3y ago

I think there is a kind of grief associated with growing up that people don’t talk about. When you are young and inspired it seems like life is long and you can do anything, branching paths with unlimited doors. Once you're an adult, your past choices narrow down your future paths, and your sense of age starts to set in. In some way you mourn the paths not taken. This is called mortality, and can be a nasty combo with other depressive factors. As you get older, you realize some doors not yet stepped through are now closed, and less doors are opened by others for you. Life can start to feel like a hallway with the investable at the end. While less doors are open now, life is still very free. You may now be able to see decades into your past, but you still cannot see into your future. There are many open doors still hidden, they just take a bit more searching. Good news, you are an adult with years of life experience, you can go find them.

tnecniv 3y ago
Coincidentally, I was rewatching the first season of True Detective last night and they were talking about this in the show. I almost turned it off because it was too real for me at the moment.
weakfish 3y ago
I just wanted to say thank you for this comment, it helped a lot of with some general anxieties plaguing me lately.
wnolens 3y ago
I need a support group for this idea. Can't seem to accept it and walk through some doors, abandoning the other paths. It's sparked a major depression in me.
marssaxman 3y ago
As I have grown older I have come to see a similar effect not just in my own life but in the shape of the world around us; humanity has closed the doors to certain kinds of futures I once hoped and worked for, and "mourning" is a good term for those feelings. There are many open doors remaining in humanity's future, to be sure, but the scope of change seems narrower than it once did, since the bright new possibilities of the future always seem to get swallowed up by the ugly messes left over from the past.

bdowling 3y ago

You could try going on an adventure, ideally a real one that is a little bit dangerous.

tnecniv 3y ago
That does always seem to work in the movies
- deleted 3y ago
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TimPC 3y ago

As someone who initially started my career in academia I've been much happier since leaving. There are opportunities across industrial R&D that are far saner in terms of compensation and while they are slightly more restrictive in terms of what you work on there are still chances to do interesting research.

godelski 3y ago
There definitely are, but to be honest, my passion is research at low TRL. Industry is saner, but they necessarily work at a higher TRL because they are not just profit motivated, but need to make profits from your research in 6 months to 3 years.

deleted 3y ago

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0x3444ac53 3y ago

Personally, I never made it very far in academia. Never even finished out undergrad. That said, I'm now at a point in my life where I'm mostly surrounded by Businesses Majors and I do truly miss my time as a philosophy student, despite being very burnt out when I left. Academia is a weird field, that, in my experience, is wonderful to have connections to, but for the most part is exhausting. Frankly I think things can be more exhausting when you love them enough to be consumed by them. Even now, I have projects that I work on in my free time that I'm so engaged and miss sleep for, and while I'm proud of whatever is produced, it does often lead me feeling frustrated and burnt out. It helped me quite a bit to start setting boundaries for myself, as in: I'm going to work on this project until this time, and then I'm taking time to disconnect from it. Even though it can be frustrating to interrupt a flow state, it's still important to take care of ones own needs.

galdosdi 3y ago

> I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help. It might help a lot by giving you a break from thinking about the kinds of things you currently think about a lot. Seriously consider it. You don't know what you don't know. Perspective helps. > First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. Not relevant -- you can come back to research later, and when you're burn out or depressed you inherently have a hard time imagining how new things could be fun > I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue. Well, as a researcher you can appreciate that there is one way to find out -- experiment. But if it started with work and later spread, work probably had a lot to do with it. Besides, burnout is really common in academia.

naveen99 3y ago

There are a couple of approaches to life I have used at various times: 1. Have fun. Limit productive activities to 2 hrs a day. 2. Go all out on a new idea. Succeed or fail. If there is no risk of failure, you are really in mode 1. 2 is only possibly for short bursts, upto 1-2 weeks. if you feel burnt out, it’s time for zone 1 for sure.

emeril 3y ago

not all meds are the same for everyone - maybe try an maoi like emsam - helped me a bunch with that feeling to varying degrees, jobs are what you make of it rather than what it makes of you