Reasons I want out #2: it takes over your life

Reason #2: Academia takes over your life

Academia is like a gas, it will fill the available space. There's always more you could be doing, another article you could be reading or writing. Reviewing practices are vaguely defined. There are milestones that are entirely all-or-nothing, pass or fail. If you don't get tenure, you're out. No warnings. If your prospectus doesn't pass, you're out.  All of that work for nothing. It can be very hard to know how you are doing, if you're doing enough, or even what exactly is enough. There is a culture that implies that you should be working all the time, that you should become your work. That the idea of leaving work at work is the sign of a less-than-serious scholar. Vacations transform into "fieldwork." Free time transforms into "research time." Leisure reading... forget about it. How about "background research for my next article?" Anyone? Anyone?

All that lovely flexibility becomes a curse, especially if you have any tendency to procrastinate. Here's what grad school basically looked like for me:

1. Undertake vaguely-defined project that I don't really want to be doing (e.g. dissertation, conference paper, etc.)

2. Procrastinate a lot, do dishes, do laundry, clean out closet, play xbox, since these are all more fun that writing some awful thing I don't want to write

3. Feel vaguely miserable and guilty because I should be working

4. Panic because of approaching deadline

5. Spend all weekend/vacation/night/etc. working frantically to finish on time

It might be different if the thing I needed to do to graduate, get tenure, or whatnot were something interesting like, say, write a novel. I don't know many academics, however, who got tenure based on a rockin sci-fi novel.

Since I've been done and working in a kind of office schmuck job, I have discovered something truly amazing: WEEKENDS RULE. I don't have to do anything on the weekend that I don't want to do!! I can take a road trip without feeling guilty. I can sit on the sofa and watch episodes of bad TV and order Chinese takeout because NO ONE EXPECTS ME TO BE WORKING ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON. This is, quite frankly, brilliant. I don't think I can go back.