The life-changing magic of leaving academia

My contribution to the immortal genre of 'quit lit'

The Door (1884), Helene Schjerfbeck (Finnish, 1862 – 1946). Public domain.

If you know me, you probably know me as an academic ‘type’. In undergrad, I sidestepped existential questions of ‘what are you doing after graduation?’ by making it clear from day one that I was in this to get to grad school. In high school, no one tells you about the academic job market because nobody knows. Jobs at that stage existed in the theoretical: if you could name it, if the role existed, then you could feasibly do it. It was simply a matter of will. We had the general sense that some careers were more sensible – law, medicine – and during my high school years there was a big push to get us girls into engineering. I decided at 13 to be a biomedical engineer, though beforehand I’d wanted to be a meteorologist (abandoned because there was too much math and not enough making barometers out of balloons and old water bottles). In tenth grade, I read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and the idea of a practical career went out the window: I would do English, actually, and before you tell me you can’t get a job with an English degree, I could tell you that I’d just do a PhD, and be an English professor. That’s a job, you know. The concern for employability was with English, not academia. Academia was surely stable – after all, lots of people go to college!

I started to get whispers that something was up when I was a freshman. Early days I’d talk to my professors, who would say something to the tune of, ‘normally, I advise people against grad school, but I think you’re an exception’. I did an internship at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and my boss told me, ‘The market is bad, but I believe good people will always get jobs.’ This theme is so common to this genre of quit lit. We all know somewhere deep down that this career path is bad, but believe that won’t apply to us, really, because we’re the special ones. I countered this foreboding by working really hard, by graduating top of my class, by excelling at my masters, by getting into a funded PhD at a good university. I kept my head; I was sensible about my chances, I told myself I could only count on the PhD – if I didn’t get a job afterwards, at least I got paid.

Normally these stories are chronicles of grief: of a dream pursued to the ragged edge, until it becomes impossible and the author has to reconstitute their sense of self amidst the debris of a precarious academic life, to imagine a new future for themselves in an unfamiliar world. This story is not like that.

What I have learned over the last few years is that my grief is within academia; my grief is for the academy. The idea of leaving is, for me, only joy. It’s the feeling of leaving an abusive relationship and finding sudden freedom, wondering, ‘Is everyone living like this?’ I feel like I’m leaving academia unscathed and on my terms, which is not to say I didn’t have my share of existential crises along the way (of course), but I found enormous comfort in talking to people who also had discovered they wanted out; had realised, like me, that something was rotten in academia; that the emperor had no clothes.

‘A few years of hell’

It goes without saying that the economic conditions in the academy are dire. Knowing that is the pre-condition of applying for a PhD: have you read the terms and conditions, which are that there are no jobs and the jobs that do exist barely pay? Check and check. To take on the odds, you either have to be extremely practical or a little delusional. Either this journey goes on for as long as you can get paid, which might just be a funded PhD, or you believe in your ability to succeed against all odds. The crucial thing here is that by the time you’re doing your PhD, you’ve been trained to see yourself as exceptional. You might (will) have impostor syndrome, but deep down you know you’ve done incredibly well to make it through increasingly competitive rounds of applications to get to do a funded research degree. That you might get lucky again doesn’t seem too out of the question.

The problem is the odds are always getting worse. I went into my undergrad wanting to go into academia, and while I was largely insulated from the realities of the job market, it is clear to me in retrospect that the academia I thought I was getting into in 2014 is one that, ten years later, no longer exists. Even going into my PhD, I was told that while getting a permanent job required ‘a few years of hell’, once you had one you were set. Four years of cuts to various humanities departments and degree programmes later, I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve seen established academics in prestigious programmes suddenly lose their jobs, with nowhere to go, because other departments certainly won’t be taking on more senior academics when they can underpay some postdocs instead. The analogy I often fall back on here is that academics in permanent roles are like faraway stars, whose light takes years to reach us on earth. Looking at them, you’re looking into the past. It takes so long for academics get a permanent contract that by the time they do, their experience of the job market is already out of date, as it will have changed so drastically from the time they entered it.

The effect of this constant precarity, and the poor working conditions (see: University and College Union strikes 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023), is that academic institutions and their corresponding online spaces (Twitter) are mired in existential malaise. Everyone, rightly, is fed up. While there are many bright spots – great students, exciting research ­– that are duly highlighted, the overwhelming tone when you’re talking to other academics is one of negativity. Everyone is tired and unsure. The complaining and the strikes are justified and necessary. But it is also true that existing in such a negative environment is emotionally exhausting.

Moreover, the academy is an institution that operates on goodwill. Academics volunteer their time to mentor undergrads, run reading groups for postgrads, to peer-review articles and books (often for for-profit publishers), to serve on executive committees for scholarly associations – the list goes on. When you’re burnt out, when your institution insists that your research needs to be done on your own time, despite that research counting towards that institution’s reputation, when the time you’re allocated to mark student work comes nowhere near how long it actually takes to mark, and when all of that is happening while you’re earning a criminally low salary, or you’re on a precarious nine-month contract and you don’t know where you’re going to be living or if you’ll even have a job next year – the first thing to go is the stuff you don’t get paid to do. Obviously. It should. But the result is that the experience of existing in academia is noticeably worse: the goodwill is gone. Suddenly everything is so much harder and more bare-bones, which creates a kind of vicious cycle of burnout and frustration.

In my thesis, I talk about the poet H.D.’s experience of the Blitz in World War II London. She writes of the ‘soul-shattering “all-clear”’.[1] H.D. experiences the all-clear siren as more traumatic than the actual bombing, as ‘[r]eleased from the threat of actual danger, we have time to think about it’.[2] Being in academia sometimes feels like this. Between our immediate, indignant responses to announcements of departments closing and funding cuts, we have time to think about it. That’s the time when it all really sinks in – when the malaise becomes unbearable.

Academic ego death

In a way, I was prepared for all of this. I expected it. And all of the above is bearable, even worth it, when you love the work. When you can’t imagine a future outside of academic research. What I didn’t expect was that that wouldn’t be true for me. The reality was, my PhD made me feel like I was a speck of dust in the air. There were parts of the research that I enjoyed, and I liked talking about my work and going to conferences, but most of it made me want to die. I started going to therapy because my sense of self-worth would bottom out completely whenever I had writer’s block, which was most days. Sometimes I would just lie on the floor and look at the ceiling. Other days I would cry. This is, as far as I can tell, a not abnormal experience of the PhD. Aside from the people I personally know who’ve experienced similar, my husband loves to quote from the article ‘Grad School is Worse for Public Health than STDs’.

For a while I thought the problem was just the writing. Then I thought maybe teaching would help. I just didn’t like being alone. I was spending too much time at home. It was the pandemic, it was lockdown, whatever it was. But it never went away. I didn’t really enjoy the research – I didn’t really feel like I was learning anything. I craved structure, deadlines, and collaboration. I started to ask myself, am I really going to kill myself to get a job in this market to just do… more of this?

My realisation that I Wasn’t Having a Good Time sparked a secondary bad-time crisis on top of my day-to-day PhD crisis. I didn’t feel like I could let academia go: so many people had believed in me and had worked so hard to help me get here. I’d worked so hard to get here! I probably could get a job if I tried. Maybe the PhD was bad but the actual job would be good.

Despite my unhappiness, leaving felt impossible. Academia was the only thing I knew.

Months of soul-searching revealed that I was harbouring a secret fear of not being ‘important’. Academia makes you feel special: after all, you’ve come so far, and you’re doing original work that nobody else gets to dictate for you. You get to go to conferences and tell everyone about it, and they tell you it’s good and that feels good. You can leverage your expertise and write articles in mainstream publications. When you tell people you’re doing a PhD, they say, ‘Wow!’ There’s a lot of external validation.

More than that, there’s a feeling that academia is somehow better than other professions. You’re here on the basis of how smart you are. You’re getting paid to think. Your money is somehow ‘pure’. That feels really good, too. (There’s a side essay here about the economics of academic exploitation, but that’s a can of worms I am as yet unwilling to open.) Suffice to say, it’s easy to buy into a false binary between work that is significant and work that makes money. You – and by you, I mean me – want to earn money, but earning any decent amount of money seems to mean turning a profit for somebody else. Earning money is somehow not altruistic like education is. You don’t trust it.

I felt, really, that if I left, I would become some nameless cog in a corporate machine, making money at the cost of my soul, no longer important to anyone. My work wouldn’t matter; I wouldn’t matter. I tried to resolve these feelings by telling myself that my expertise wouldn’t go away if I left academia after my PhD – I could still write, or pitch articles about my poets, or even write papers and go to conferences. But a scarier question hung over me: would I even want to?

Why was that so scary to me? Why did I fear the loss of desire for some kind of significance? I was trapped by my academic ego. I didn’t want to waste my talents; I didn’t want to waste the time I’d already spent. Despite the constant anxiety and imposter syndrome I experienced in the academy, I couldn’t let go of a desire to matter. Or even the desire to desire to matter – despite the fact that the metrics of that ‘mattering’ were, frankly, bullshit. As one ex-academic I spoke to told me, way more people will read your non-academic work. More than that, it’s okay to not want what you’ve been taught to want; it’s okay to not care anymore.

‘What else is there?’

Success in academia – at its best – is based on qualities like originality, intellectual rigour, generosity of mind, and a willingness to ask hard questions. It’s all underpinned by the fundamental belief in the value of the work you’re doing – after all, you’re the one advocating for it, day in and day out. Nobody is going to get the funding for your work but you, so you’d best believe it matters. And it does matter. I fundamentally believe in the humanities. I have always loved literature and the arts, philosophy, history, and all the rest – it’s good to stretch the mind, it’s good to think about what it means to exist, it’s good to examine our humanity in as many ways as we can. I think the difficulty of the paradigm of the academic humanities is that we become so entrenched in advocating for the value of our work that we forget that other work can have value.

When I imagined what a happy, fulfilled life would look like for me, I could let go of the sense of ‘ego’ I felt was trapping me in academia. If I imagined myself at the end of my life looking back, I knew articles or academic reputation wouldn’t matter to me. But I was stuck on my perception of work outside academic or other closely related fields – publishing, the arts – as soul-crushing and horrible. (That my experience inside academia was soul-crushing and horrible seemed not to factor in…)

I think this perception that all non-ac work is awful is a coping mechanism we use to endure the academic job market. We put up with hell because it’s better than the alternative. That we think this way is pretty good news for university administrators. They want us to believe that being a suit sucks – that’s why they make the big bucks, and you don’t. Your work is fun, that’s your reward! Don’t leave! It’s terrible out there! But the reality is a lot more like this:

The question of value in humanities academia is fraught. It’s nebulous. It’s almost impossible to quantify, and every attempt seems to somehow denigrate what we’re doing. And the work is valuable. Just not, I guess, economically valuable. And we as individuals do not exist outside the economy.

Feeling economically undervalued (read: having a low salary) affects how you see the value of your work, but questioning that value, or even opening the conversation about it, feels taboo. Talking about ‘value’ somehow jeopardises our buy-in to the all-importance of the academic project, which is worthy of the sacrifice of our time or resources or stability of life because we are part of something greater than ourselves. The pay is secondary because your work has meaning. If you say you feel like your work doesn’t matter, the answer is an immediate, ‘of course it does!’ as a tautological rebuttal: it matters because it matters. Not only that, it matters the most. As a friend of mine once said, ‘Yeah, the pay is shit, but what else is there?’ (This level of candour is rare – if questioned, I doubt any academic would suggest that work outside the academy is meaningless, but my point here is that academia exists within a shared psychological and emotional atmosphere, and the feeling that work outside academia is somehow lesser is pervasive.)

Leaving academia and taking a job ‘for the money’, felt like it would affirm that my academic work didn’t matter. It didn’t mean enough to keep me in the system. Or, conversely, it was the only work that could matter, and now I was resigning myself to a lifetime of meaninglessness. Either way, I was ‘selling out’.

Once I had decided to leave, though, all of this agonising fell away. It was clear I could find meaningful work that I enjoyed, and I could get paid for it. I still struggled with feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty, having delayed the post-graduation crisis of ‘what am I going to do for work???’ for two degrees. But the stakes of these questions were vastly reduced. They didn’t determine the boundaries of my reality anymore.

Come on in, the water’s fine

I’ll write another post later about the job I’m going into and why I chose it, but in looking for a career path I knew I wanted something that made me feel how academia used to: engaged, excited, optimistic. I wanted to feel like I was learning new things again.

I could see in my husband’s job that it was possible to do meaningful work for an employer that supported you instead of an employer you constantly had to fight. That you could feel valued and create value. Moreover, in hitching my wagon to an industry that feels like it’s moving forward rather than in an inevitable and endless decline, I’m reconsidering my pessimism as an inborn trait. Maybe the crippling nostalgia I’ve felt for so long is a by-product of the fact that the only route to happiness as an academic that I could imagine is if the academy went back to ‘how it used to be’ (whatever that was, whenever it was).

Last year, I went to see Oppenheimer and left the cinema in tears. I saw academia depicted as I’d fantasised it would be. Then I saw an enormous explosion.  It felt cathartic. Whatever the academy had been, it had been obliterated: in part, because of projects like the atomic bomb. We are living in the aftermaths, but we don’t have to sit here and wait for the next bomb to fall. We don’t have to exist in that terrible space between crises.

Ultimately, I left because I wanted to leave. I have friends who continue to suffer because they want to stay. I have nothing but respect for them and want desperately for them to succeed. I think that their work truly matters; I think even more that they themselves matter. They deserve a holistic and supportive working environment. I don’t know if they’ll get it if they stay.

I feel lucky that I jumped before I was pushed, but I think part of why I did is because I’ve been trying to take this whole thing apart critically since the first year of my PhD, when I realised my department was vastly under-equipped to provide us with visions of alternate futures after this degree. Many people, myself included, go into a PhD with a student’s sense of what matters in work. We underestimate how much working conditions, institutional support, and salary will affect our daily lives. We don’t know what it might be like to work somewhere that employs people to make your life easier. We don’t imagine that’s possible. (It is possible.)

This essay won’t resonate with a lot of people. If that’s you, know that I deeply admire your commitment to your research. I hope the university gets better for you and I hope you prioritise yourself where you can in the meantime.

If you’re reading this and it does resonate – if you’re questioning, like I was – all I can say is, it’s nice out here. It might even be better.

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[1] H.D., Tribute to Freud (Boston: David R. Godine, 1974), pp. 102.

[2] Ibid., p. 103.