Misery in academia.

The other week this "successful" academic I know from a decently older cohort in my program - "successful" in that she now has tenure at a college somewhere - posted the most astonishing few tweets to Twitter within a few hours of each other.

One tweet asked how many times a day was it okay to cry, between your car and your office and in the parking lot.

The other tweet said that sometimes she just wanted to quit.

And, her handle was her own professional name and thus easily findable through Google.

And, replies included another young tenured professor who said that she's cried at meetings a few times.

What misery they have, and how publicly filtered, almost like they have no friends or people to rely on anywhere close to them, so they just put it all out there in weird ways. 

I wonder if this type of misery was always out there, among young tenured faculty?

Part of me suspects that it was, but now everything is heightened, and they had to sacrifice more to get a job that they don't necessarily like all that much in a place that they don't necessarily like all that much, and maybe their schools are financially distressed to boot.

And who knows, maybe they don't have a real passion for what they study and maybe their schools increasingly focus on serving the privileged, so they don't necessarily have a sense of meaningful work to ground them.  Maybe.

It really makes me realize what good life choices I made, to just avoid the whole nonsense of trying to compete for the few of the tenure-track jobs that are left.  Unless you have money and time to burn as you spin wheels and look for a good situation, you're just better off avoiding that nonsense altogether.