Academia brainwashes you to live in a fantasy land where everyone pretends “academic freedom” and the pursuit of knowledge arms scholars against exploitation and assaults on dignity. I spent years with cognitive dissonance, even lost a marriage in part because the demands of my 'career' placed strains on the relationship. Now that I've decided to leave after I complete my dissertation, I have started recognizing all of the ways in which it alienates me from both myself and my labor. Like a week ago when the journal that published my work simply responded to my request for a copy of my article with a link to it as though I was clueless about how to find it on the internet. I ultimately requested it from my university's library. I don't have direct access to it because it is the intellectual property of a major academic publisher.
And that's far from the worst of it. The worst part is how saturated the market is. It's turned the ability to churn out written products at warp speed and get grants into signifiers of worth to the University and prestige to peers. If you want to get a tenure-track position at an R1 in my discipline, you need 8 to 10 peer-reviewed articles coming out of a PhD program. Even then, you might need to do a postdoc first to prove you can get funding. I am not complaining because I wasn't cut out for that. I have 8 publications and more in prep and under review… I simply can't continue putting off living to work 80 hours a week for another 8 years.
Those of us who accept these conditions or even embrace them for a while confuse masochism with dedication or passion. We remind ourselves every day that “one day” we will achieve tenure and be able to live life, have hobbies, develop deeper emotional connections.
But we waste 10 to 15 years working ourselves to death first. And for what?