A Future in Academia?

Abandon all hope (of structure), ye who click here.

My first year out of high school has finished. Nothing much to say. Good grades, irrelevant courses, nice new friends. I don’t care much for this life. I know it’s, like, setting me up for the future or whatever but my future has nothing to do with business so it all feels a little pointless.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be an academic. I couldn’t tell you why. My dad’s a trucker, my mom works in manufacturing, and my grandparents were all farmers. One must wonder, then, why the fuck am I doing any of this?

The more I look into the minutiae of an academic career, it seems almost suicidal. I could get a job for some big company, sell my soul developing bullshit solutions to problems no one has, and get paid a pretty penny. Or, I could stay in school for 8-10 more years, push my brain and wallet to its limits, spend god knows how many years taking postdoc positions at whatever universities will offer them to me.

It’s an entirely illogical decision to do so, but I want to. I don’t see a world in which I stop my education with a Bachelor’s and still manage to sleep at night. Don’t get me wrong, fuck the prestige. That’s not what matters to me. It’s the idea of working as a soulless drone for Palantir my whole life that haunts me.

Academia, for all its reputation of “purity” is, like any other field, dominated by capital. Universities need to make money and a lot of that, especially what gets allocated to Grad departments, comes from research grants. The idea of sitting in front of my computer, writing an email to some petty bourgeois grant manager, explaining how category theory can support our allies in Israel, that is the stuff that would keep me awake at night.

The more I write, the worse of an idea it sounds. If I was a better writer, I would turn everything around and describe a world of sunshine and rainbows. How to perform such an act confounds me. Perhaps it’s intentional: make higher education sound like a fool’s errand to attract only the most Quixotic youths. More likely, though, is that the interests of capital undermine the joy that could be found in the endeavour.

I’m a child of immigrants. Technically, I’m an immigrant myself, arriving in Canada at the ripe age of 2. That feels like a bit of a copout, but I’ve always taken pride in my background. My parents both worked shitty, low-paying jobs to give my brother and I a chance at success. There’s a pressure on both of us to dig our family out of the dirt and, as much as I hate to admit it, he’s doing a way better job than me. Maybe it’s not great that he’s 16 and trying to be a hustler. Maybe, though, it’s not great that I’m 18 and trying to be an “academic”.

This whole rant reads like a suicide note but I pinky swear I’m much more hopeful than I’m letting on. Come back in a decade and see what’s changed, okay?