Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it
Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they&#x27;d didn&#x27;t really do a whole lot of work.  They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on.  They&#x27;d mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their energy was going into cultivating relationships that would aid their career trajectories, rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research.<p>They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn&#x27;t hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.<p>The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there&#x27;s a pool of funding available for something? That&#x27;s not worth the bother.  In that case it&#x27;s just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?<p>Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives, and maybe some politicians with special interests, and if they&#x27;re not interested in supporting research into your field of interest, you might as well forget about it, unless you can finance a million-dollar-a-year research lab on your own. I suppose it&#x27;s possible, but not very common.<p>Regardless, not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about, unfortunately.  Overwork and risking burnout might be part of the price you have to pay to get there, at least in our rather dystopian modern American society. (Notably, the author of this piece relocated from UK to Norway...)