Hello bloggy friends, this is your friendly neighborhood academic! Only I’m not so much friendly as I am grouchy as f*ck.
I have reached a level of business that is probably a bit like the eye of the storm. Around me, the vortex of job demands suctions everything in its path, yet I sit in the middle, pretending that things are not as crazy as they are. Pretending that things are not completely out of control.
I have more tasks competing for my time than ever before and than I ever thought possible. And it’s not because I don’t say no, because I promise I say no all the time; I’m a veritable Queen of No these days. I delete, unread, way more emails from all sources than should be allowed in a civilized society. Yet, with teaching overload, endless admin tasks, nonstop proposal writing, conference organization, editorship, and trying to run a research program, advise graduate students, and get papers out, I am now at the level of overwhelm where I am late with everything, disappointing everyone, and I can’t even muster the energy to care.
Everyone wants my time/attention, and they will just have to get in line and I will get to whatever they need when I get to it.
There’s no amount of prioritization that will help it. Other than death, the only solution is retirement, something I’ve been dreaming of with increasing frequency. Alas, I’ve got another decade and a half till then.
I read online that people are much happier in their 50s than in their 40s because in your 40s you are an old young, while in your 50s you are a young old. That’s true; I feel better about myself as a person, about my inner worth, and about my relationships with important people (my husband and kids) than ever before.
But the decade and a half that I still have to devote to the job seems simultaneously brief and positively endless.
As for my fiction writing, I haven’t worked on the next novel since the semester started and I left off at about 40%. I really want to get back to it, but I don’t have time, or actually I don’t have guilt-free time. How can I write when there are all these job-related obligations I should fulfill instead? I’ve been trying to stave off the writing cravings through short fiction and quick prompt-based writing games on social media, but that’s like eating granola bar when what you really crave is a huge steak.
I’m not a child, and I know I need to suck it up and do what needs to be done. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to push myself to do things I don’t want to do, because there’s no end and no respite. I’m being overly dramatic now, and things do get better between semesters, but breaks are only enough to sort-of catch up, not to get ahead of the work or to actually rest.
I don’t know if this is garden-variety burnout, midlife edition, or if perhaps we are still reeling from the effects of Covid, and by that I don’t mean physical but mental. It’s definitely true that students after Covid are not what they used to be. I have more students than in the past, but they are on average much more poorly prepared to tackle class material. The math level has dropped off the cliff for reasons I don’t fully understand, but it makes it very hard to teach students physics when they lack fluency in basic algebra and introductory calculus. I’ve always enjoyed teaching undergrads, but I feel increasingly hopeless at how vast a chasm of ignorance I face every semester. I literally have to remind (reteach?) people how to do a cross product, that a^n-b^n is not equal to (a-b)^n, how to use the chain rule in differentiation, how to perform integration by parts. Something like 75% of people cannot calculate the first derivative without making some sort of calculation error along the way.
I really shouldn’t complain. In the corporate world, I would be treated to the analogue of “take the old dog behind the barn and shoot it.” I am aware that keeping a job through disillusionment and burnout is a great privilege.
But it doesn’t change the fact that after twenty years in the ever-more-grinding grind, it’s hard to be chipper about it. That I literally cannot remember the last time I had a free, restful weekend, and not just anxiety-ridden forced downtime during which all pending tasks loom like an ominous specter.
And this doesn’t even touch on everything that’s going on politically. I know as grownups we’re supposed to hold it together, but it’s been years now of holding it together. Eventually, everyone needs to unclench.
The vaguely scatological metaphor aside, how are things going with you, blogosphere?
xykademiqz 
I am actually really thankful right now for the moments of getting to edit papers and for my time in the classroom. Everything else feels incredibly fucked. I’m in an environmental conservation field and all of my funding support is in climate change adaptation. We’re basically just waiting for it to all be pulled and then I will have $0 to support my lab group and no easy path to replenish our funding. At the same time, so many young scientists just lost their jobs in federal service and the ones that didn’t are working through regular abuse (emails telling them that they have done illegal things and that they should report on each other) and fear of retribution (emails telling them that they have to be ‘loyal’ or they’ll be fired). Plus there’s another big federal firing coming this month and they’re targeting any science that might get in the way of vastly expanded mining/drilling on federal lands. That’s basically everyone who works on any form of environmental science. How can I rationalize training more PhDs when their career paths are being obliterated? I am having a hard time being hopeful.
So, yeah, fuck the stupid pointless tasks.
I’ve noticed the same thing with math, though for me that’s just basic algebra content. Yesterday a student snapped at me in a review session that he was bad at math when he asked what 123 + 456 was and I was like, well, let’s see… 6+3 is nine and 5+2 is 7… (there was no carrying! 2nd grade stuff! and like, no wonder you don’t pick it up with that attitude…) Another student dropped my class because he said I embarrassed him in front of the class when he answered an algebra 2 remembering thing wrong (like a rule of exponent thing but not that, not that it’s likely he reads your blog comments, but there’s always the chance one of my coworkers does).
I’m thinking of having DC2 take an AMC10 course over the summer. Also more non-fiction writing. Zie is very good at writing informal stuff in a breezy manner but terrible at anything formal.
Long distance shoulder pats from me. That all sounds really stressful. And dude, they need to hire more teaching faculty in your department. There’s no reason that you should still be teaching overloads. It is a fixable problem and you shouldn’t always be the solution.
Hang in there! I seem to have gone past burnout to I dunno, a sort of dissociated zen. I don’t know if it’s better or at all healthy but it is making things survivable, except around 2 or 3 am when I wake up and need to read some novel to get back to sleep.
I’m at an R-1 university, and I’ve seen several colleagues retire in their 50s or early 60s, largely due to increasing workloads—higher teaching loads and escalating research output demands from the administration—as well as the arrogance and bureaucracy of new leadership. Many of them can afford to retire early because they don’t have children and therefore lack significant financial burdens. Those with children, however, often plan to retire once their kids enter or graduate from college.
This shift is hard to imagine, as earlier generations of professors typically worked into their 70s or 80s, retiring only when they became mentally or physically incapable of continuing. But things have changed dramatically. Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic made us reevaluate what truly matters in life—spending time with family and friends and doing meaningful work that benefits others. Or maybe higher education has transformed into a business, where faculty function like startups, expected to generate revenue for the university or risk being pushed out. Meanwhile, students have become customers, and institutions prioritize their satisfaction, effectively “selling” degrees. Academic freedom is no longer what it once was.
In the past, retired professors were still welcome to mentor students or maintain an office on campus. Now, once they retire, they disappear entirely—there’s no space allocated to them because even tenure-track faculty struggle to find office space.
Burn out is real. Can you switch to only teaching or only research for a couple of years, that will give you some time to recover? Also, ignore more stuff, free work as an editor or a reviewer, who needs it? Committee work, can be passed to someone junior. Anyway, good luck. Please find some time to rest.
A big part of why I retired early was teaching a required course to 100 students every year. It was so draining I could do little else. Not fair to myself or to my family.
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