An observation on academic employment.

Whenever I have contact with people still employed in academia -- especially tenured professors, I think? -- it's really astonishing to me how much of their lives and mental space is spent on thinking about individual people and the ramifications of what they are or aren't doing, in all of these elaborate shades of details and speculation.

Like, what the Dean is doing, or what program is coming down in their department, or how badly things are organized under so-and-so, and it's just sort of like that ad infinitum.

Like, even if I wanted to, I just could never talk that much about any individuals at the resthome where I worked or at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, even about the people who are annoying or a bit conniving or who do sh*t that kind of derails my job a bit at very sporadic moments.

Why?

Because pretty much everyone does their job, and even if it's not ideal, they're still pretty much doing their job, and they really don't have time for anything else.

With the academics, the amount of "he did this, and he did that" is almost like a middle-school girl talking about her crush, only it's some kind of sick and abusive crush, because so often it doesn't seem like they even particularly like all these people who make them think so much about them.

This kind of gets back to what my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) observed, that from what she's seen, so much of academic employment is "busy work" that really doesn't produce anything, from all the time and energy that gets sunk into it.