It was nice to get away over the Easter weekend – I went with some friends down to St. Lucia, on the east coast of South Africa north of Durban. I’m not generally the sort of person who gets much out of simply lazing on a beach. What I usually need from a holiday is to get amongst some fine natural scenery and fully indulge my mind’s more introspective flights of fancy, which gets quite difficult when the rowdy family parked six inches from your head is kicking sand in your face; I tend to find the gentle ambulatory rhythms of a long hike to be a better meditative aid. This time, however, it seems that a bit of concentrated laziness was just what I needed; besides, it turns out that South African beaches are generally a little less crowded than British ones.
In fact there was still a fair amount of distraction, in the shape of the five year-old daughter of one of my companions, but even this was not without its pleasures: you can get plenty of enjoyment out of letting yourself get swept along by the pure, unselfconscious, enjoyment youngsters seem to get from playing around in the waves. I even built a sandcastle. Nonetheless, it struck me that even in full carefree relaxation mode (or at least, as close to it as I’m probably going to get) my inner scientist still wasn’t fully switched off. I still found myself examining the darker heavy mineral layers within the normal beach sand, taking an interest in the standing waves being set up within the breakers that lashed the shore, and wondering about the current and wind patterns in the Indian Ocean that were producing the warm and welcoming water that I was swimming in. Is this, I wonder, a symptom of excessive monomania?
There’s more than a kernel of truth in the reputation for extreme single-mindedness that the denizens of academia, and scientists in particular, are awarded in the public mind, a tendency that can be accounted for by two very different, but mutually reinforcing, pressures. The first is simply the fact that for many scientists, the line between ‘job’ and ‘hobby’ is a little blurred; the second is that in many people’s minds ‘obsessive workaholic’ is almost a synonym for ‘good scientist’.
It’s no surprise that passion for your work can lead you to spend more hours than are strictly necessary doing it. When I’m in the middle of a tricky analysis, or writing a paper, I don’t shy away from working weekends and evenings if I’m on a roll; the enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction of having your data confirm your pet hypothesis, or of hunting down the elusive eureka moment, when you finally understand what’s going on, can make it hardly seem like work. As someone who studies the Earth for the living, it’s also no surprise that I see things of professional interest as I travel around it, but I’ve always felt that the ability to see past worlds as well as the present one when I contemplate a landscape only adds to the richness of the experience; indeed, that feeling of being more fully engaged with the world has always been one of geology’s more seductive lures.
However, like Female Science Professor and Physioprof, I do get concerned – and irritated – when scientists’ natural inclinations, and their worries about progressing in what is currently a highly competitive academic job market, are exploited to force, cajole and guilt people into contributing more time than they need or want to. When people who spend every waking hour in the lab or office are held up as paragons of research virtue, rather than outliers, suddenly working extra hours seems less of a choice, and more of a necessity to get ahead; and although this pressure isn’t solely applied in their direction, I can certainly see how women and other minorities within the academy will feel it more acutely, because they want to avoid providing another “legitimate” excuse for their being passed over.
In my experience, working all the time is highly counterproductive. However much a project might interest you initially, if that’s all you think about and work on, week in, week out, there comes a time when you’re tired and jaded, and completely sucked dry of any enthusiasm. Look at any late-stage PhD student. Besides, this in-the-office-at-all-costs approach ignores the benefits that come from leaving your subconscious to mull things over for a while. I’ve always found that the best course of action if I’m really stuck on a problem is to put it aside and go and do something completely different; on returning to the problem afresh, it seems that a little bit of my brain has kept plugging away, and I find that I suddenly know exactly how to phrase that tricky part of the paper that I’m writing, or what that chunk of data that I’ve been struggling with actually means.
Simplistically then, one could argue that achieving some semblance of balance between your academic career and the rest of your life is just a matter of making sure that your extra work is being driven by your own personal interest, rather than the unrealistic* expectations of your supervisors or colleagues. The problem is, of course, that we are often driven by a murky mixture of both: someone might start off working a couple of hours over the weekend because they’re excited about some new results and want to see what they say, but then might find themselves crying off a trip to the pub or a nice walk in the country because “I really should get this analysis done”.
There’s no doubt that there are some very driven scientists out there, who will not be satisfied until they’re acclaimed as the undisputed top dog in their field, and are obviously willing to commit a considerable amount of time and energy in pursuit of this goal. I bear this ultra-workaholic minority no grudge, but I do have problems with using them as the baseline for “success” in science, because it means that those of us who harbour more modest ambitions – to be respected in our fields, yes, but to also have a life outside of our research – almost feel like we’re letting the side down. Just consider the attitudes to my geoblogging: something that a layperson might consider as a symptom of an unhealthy obsession with my subject is more likely to be regarded by my academic colleagues as a time sink that distracts me from doing more research. That particular paradox has always amused me, but it also points to a slight disconnect between the ivory tower and reality (shocking, I know…).
Counteracting the combined weights of personal inclination and career pressure can prove quite difficult, especially when even making the attempt is unfairly frowned upon as showing a lack of commitment – as witnessed by the prevalence of unsympathetic and rather inflexible attitudes towards parenting within academia**. My own dilemma is rather the opposite; in the unfortunate absence of any partner or offspring, I need to ensure that I actively seek out counterbalancing interactions and experiences outside of the workplace, lest I find myself drifting by default into a lonely, slightly monomaniacal, and ultimately unproductive mental rut. This becomes a particular challenge when you suddenly find yourself on the other side of the world from most of your social network. I’m honestly not convinced that I’ve achieved a good balance in my life here yet, but although I can’t deny my work does sometimes leak out into the rest of my life, I’m hoping to avoid full-blown monomania if I can.
*I wish more people would acknowledge the fact that these expectations often are unrealistic, and that you are perfectly justified in ignoring them when they are. If more people do this, then maybe we can establish a more realistic standard, to the benefit of all.
**Which is pretty ridiculous when you think about it – there can’t be many environments more amenable than academia to flexible working practices, meaning that once again this must largely come down to the apparent need for everyone to sacrifice their entire life on the altar of Science to be considered a “success”.
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