Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’
Postgraduate student depression and suicidality is at horrifying proportions. The universities don&#x27;t care. No one cares. Academia is super fucked and super fucked up, and it just keeps marching onward with blindfold on and fingers in ears, yelling &quot;LA LA LA LA&quot; as loud as possible.<p>Academic positions are basically gone. Whatever didn&#x27;t vanish completely after the 2009 recession is definitely gone now. Universities continue to purge full professorship as a possibility and continue to shovel more work for less pay onto adjuncts and graduate students making less than minimum wage. And then they put on a big smile for the kids and say &quot;One day you will be a college professor. Look how nice it is. You should join us.&quot; A huge lie. A huge malicious pyramid scheme of a scam. Every program churns out PhDs by the dozens every year. Which academic positions are they going to fill? Which of their advisors are retiring? There aren&#x27;t any positions. Nobody is retiring.<p>And if you think that _science_ is bad, try a non-science field. There&#x27;s lots of machines being built out there in the world. There&#x27;s not a lot of people these days giving enough shits to pay historians.<p>I can&#x27;t think of any other area where it&#x27;s the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.