By Jon Cogburn
I know why lawyers are unhappy. You have to be pretty smart to get through law school and then the job is mostly unrelenting drudgery sometimes percolated with backstabbing your colleagues on the way to the top. I know why neurosurgeons are unhappy. Human beings are not built for medical school and residency and, when it comes to brain damage, there are very few happy endings. I know why police officers and prison guards are unhappy. Being the sharp end of Leviathon's stick is not conducive to flourishing. I know why classical musicians are unhappy. Like lawyers, you have to have a lot on the ball to get the gig, but then it's aesthetic drudgery, serving at the whims of a dictatorial director.
But why are tenured philosophy professors unhappy? It doesn't make very much sense. The job security is pretty good. The pay's not horrible. You have more control over your time and physical space than most other victims of late capitalism. Objectively speaking, your colleagues are less irritating than when you worked at that large retail store in high school. There are always some great students. And, if you are not a total bum, you get an hour or two each day doing what you claim to love. Why the unhappiness? Why so much alcoholism? Why are so many of us taking prescription happy pills?
The weirdest thing is that a lot of people only fall apart after getting tenure. I don't have statistics, but off the top of my head I can think of six friends of mine have gone through appalling levels of suffering which commenced immediately after receiving tenure. Two are just phoning in their jobs, trying to find meaning elsewhere. Two are medicated and still trying to hold onto the idea that philosophy is a calling. One has been institutionalized twice and ultimately quit the academy (again, after getting tenure). One died early from alcoholism. Maybe this is because of a lack of imagination (the mass of men living lives of quiet desperation, after all), or maybe it's just the philosophers I hang around with, but I do think that my non-academic friends are on the whole quite a bit happier than my tenured philosopher friends.
I might be wrong about the relative distribution of unhappiness. In any case independent of the statistics, one can still inquire into the causes of philosophy professor unhappiness. Here are some hypotheses:
- Decompression Sickness – According to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Kierkegaard said that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. While it's clear from this that Kierkegaard did not have a panic disorder, there is something to it. Up to the point of tenure, academics are relentlessly pushed by external forces. If you don't jump through some very high hoops (and get very lucky) you are out on your ear. With tenure all of that pressure is suddenly lifted and people have to find out what's really important to them. This is strangely the opposite of the way that terminal disease gives life meaning. With terminal diseases people are intensely aware of the finite amount of time left and how their choices affirm values. Awareness of lack of freedom somehow increases the awareness of freedom. But tenure is the opposite, an amorphous blob in which people lose themselves. I think that some realize that they really don't like philosophy that much any more. It wasn't initially a calling after all, but rather academia was more like an aspirational lifestyle that became a forced march. When you don't have to keep marching you suddenly have to wonder who this person is twenty or so years after they took that first intro class. How could they have known at that point whether it really was a calling or not? In any case, I think that the loss of self when the external pressure is removed is actually traumatizing for some people.
- Social Stigma – We usually go along with the jokes at our expense, trying to correct Marco Rubio type idiocy when we can without being killjoys. But it's actually not at all fun being a socially acceptable punchline. About half of the population thinks what we teach is at best a waste of time and their tax dollars. At worst we are practicing some kind of harmful indoctrination. If you are a philosophy professor then your family members who watch Fox News routinely treat you like your more rednecky family members treat Cousin Ernie's black girlfriend at the Christmas party. Even when well intentioned (to be fair, it almost always is) it's a drag. And strangers are not so well intentioned. And this stigma reaches into the academy itself. We aren't STEM. We don't bring in grants. We have to scrape and beg just to get someone to cover our ethics classes.
- The Impossibility of Doing a Good Job – At most universities nobody can be stellar at teaching, service, and research. So the vast majority of us are always failing at something, not bad enough to get canned (else decompression sickness wouldn't be an issue), but bad enough to feel guilty. If you put more time into research, then you are free riding off of your colleague's willingness to do the awful, submental make-work (assessment, strategic planning, etc.) coming down administration, who are responding to incompetent accreditors, governmental bodies and the strange logic of the management myth. If, on the other hand, you help carry the department in this way, it will fill up your brain and time with nonsense and eat into your research. And the metrics by which "good teaching" are measured don't have much to do with good teaching. Basically, for most of us, there's always a stick to beat ourselves with.
- The Hours – It's great to have control over your own time, but when you're putting sixty to eighty hours a week in there's not that much time to go around. And the extent to which you don't put that time in just makes problem #3 worse.
- Nobody Cares – If a couple of hundred people read this blog post (optimistic), that will be more than have read several papers that it's taken me years to write. I've tried to reason my way out of this before (e.g. here, here, and more lengthy treatment I can't find on google). It is something that the overwhelming majority of us have to reason our ways out of. Writing is intrinsically social, and it's a lot of work to get anything published. But then nobody shows up.
- Dialectics – The whole process of making progress by disproving bad philosophies means that to the extent that anything you do or say does get noticed, it's going to be attacked.
- Truth Schmooth – Truth is wonderful, but pursuing it monomaniacly might crowd out the prospects of having a proper relation to beauty and goodness. Philosophy professors tend to be rude and dress badly. These might just be symptoms of a deeper spiritual rot. I don't know.
- I'll Show You Unhappiness! – Google "first world problems" and then google "academic job crisis" or "adjunctification." Basically, tenured professors have no right to complain. But, on the other hand, maybe not having a right to unhappiness maybe sometimes increases unhappiness?
Those are the only eight that I can think of.
I haven't considered the extent to which philosophy attracts unhappy people in the first place. I mean, well watered houseplants don't have any need of philosophy. They (I imagine) are just happy photosynthesizing. I think that philosophy, like other creative endeavors and certain forms of religion, attracts people who experience the brokenness of the world and the self yet also have experience of the numinous (truth, beauty, goodness), experience that partially transcend the all encompassing brokenness. But meaningful unhappiness just is the experience of brokenness. I wish it were the case that unhappy tenured philosophy professors were, through their unhappiness, bearing witness to this brokenness. But, as is appropriate to philosophy, it's more meta than that, instead of bearing witness to the brokenness of the world, bearing witness to the vanity of twenty or so years of trying to transcend that brokenness. There is a kind of wisdom here I think, one that needn't lead to despair. But perhaps it is something manifest in action rather than cognized and argued about.
Probably one of the best things you have ever written.
And how depressing is that!
I’m going to propose a 9th factor: career fixity. Most people are stuck in the same academic job forever, if they’re lucky enough to get tenure, and that may explain your observation that the tenured are even more miserable. If you hate your job and don’t hit it off with your colleagues in other professions, you simply look elsewhere, and better yet you can often choose a preferred geographic area. But in academia many people are stuck where they are. Eventually making it to Full Professor means a salary increase and perhaps a bit more respect on campus, but in many cases the newly promoted Full Prof is still looking at another 15-20 years of doing the same thing over and over again until retirement.
Ha!
9. Whinging on Social Media.
That makes a lot of sense.
Perhaps the reason we must imagine Sisyphus happy is because we so often actually perceive the opposite.
Just my impression, but I think (5) probably has a whole lot to do with it. My wife is an academic in psychology, where papers actually get read and engaged with. And the tenured faculty in her department seem pretty happy. In philosophy, on the other hand, chances are you work for decades…only to write papers that no one reads or cites. If that’s not depressing, I don’t know what is. Most of us get into philosophy (I think) because we love engaging with ideas…so when all of our hard work is ignored, it is hard not to feel like one wasted all of one’s time.
I also think (3) is a big part of the story. I never feel good enough at anything I do.
The truth is neither pleasant nor popular. Philosophy classically falls under Saturn: think Durer’s ‘Melancolia’. Philosophers who are not temperamentally inclined to unhappiness are probably in the field as an escape rather than a calling.
Maybe this is part of your point 3, but I think there is deep tension between being a good philosopher and being a good academic. I think that especially when you think of philosophy as a calling, it is easy to feel torn between that calling and what you have done or continue to have to do, as your job. Ministers for what it is worth have a similar problem, being torn between their highest ideals and the the daily ugly sausage making of working with congregations …
Thanks Jon. Your posts almost always have a beating heart in them, and a good heart at that.
I wonder though just how many/what percentage of tenured philosophers are overall unhappy. One part of thinking that they are is a function of place in the profession and relative comfort of associates, and the internet as a magnified center of discontent, made glorious summary (as it were) by stunning remarks. Most of the people I’ve met at the higher levels of our profession are happy, engaged, productive, and even teach well. And they seem like really decent people for the most part. But then again they are endowed chairs, teach at most two/three classes a year, make 6 figures, lots of mentions of their philosophical uses, etc. And their immediate colleagues are like-lives. And they remain pretty silent on the net, it seems to me.
But face it–most of us ain’t that. This is my 35th year of teaching 4/4 in a freshman-sophomore transfer institution in a huge public university system. I managed to write several pieces in some nice journals that hardly anyone read. My non-departmental colleagues on campus and in my state-wide 13-campus department are not properly compensated and have been actively attacked by Rethuglicans who wish to dismantle public education. But y’know what? Most tenured people I know are, if not entirely happy–who could be?–they are happy enough. Have I lost colleagues to alcoholism? Yes. But some of those more privileged members of philosophy have as well. Such addictions broadly cut across the professions generally.
I wonder if most of this is purely generational. The people I associate with for the most part are boomers (or R1-types irrespective of age), and to an extent rode the demographic wave to where the shore is in sight. My younger colleagues who successfully negotiated the non-R1 tenure-track are much more vulnerable to the economic and professional vicissitudes of state politics, right down to whether their students may be packing guns legally in the classroom pretty soon. I do not envy them–tenured or untenured. I wonder what my attitude would be if I were 20 years younger. I wonder how much I would take to the blogs to voice my discontent.
But I’m happy enough–and very grateful for the career I’ve had. One part of that is that I came from a poor family, so as I face retirement–with a guaranteed pension my parents would only dream of–and despite the fact I’m a philosophical nobody–I am happy enough. Expectations have to be part of all this, and expectations must be partly a function of family background. By the lights of the R1 crowd in philosophy, I’m a nobody. By my own assessment of where I came from–with a huge nod to the role of good luck–I’m somebody. And I have the audacity to think I still might have something worthwhile to contribute in my remaining years.
But one thing never changed over all these years. I love teaching, and I’ll miss it. Maybe not the 4/4–but the passion of exchanging ideas in the classroom–oh yes, I’ll miss it.
I think about this kind of issue a lot, and I am now teaching a weekly class to addicts about using spiritual tools to cope with hardship/ find happiness. One fallacy that you are prey to here is that happiness is a function of external circumstances. Once basic survival and social needs are met, happiness is possible under even the most strenuous circumstances. I teach clients to find a feeling of safety, to practice empathy for others, and to cultivate acceptance and gratitude. I have not ventured into forgiveness or meditation/prayer, yet, but they are kind of on my horizon as topics to consider. The first is too advanced for my present audience, and the second is difficult to address in a way that is accessible to people from any or no religions.
One thing that is very interesting to me is the relationship between trauma and bodily feelings–trauma survivors dissociate from their bodily sensations because they are intolerable, and then this becomes a habitual strategy for dealing with stress. I think some academics are prone to this sort of dissociation. By spending all of their conscious time in the pre-frontal cortex, they are able to ignore bodily feelings (which come from the middle brain). They may be doing this as a result of trauma, as a strategy for coping, or it may just be a way to succeed in the profession, but either way it cuts them off from happiness insofar as they are not experiencing the pleasures of present contact with others and beauty in the world. See Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book _The Body Keeps the Score_ for the underlying theory here. I am probably not representing it very well.
You are probably saved from this dissociation by your close family relations and your music, but academics who are socially isolated and have no hobbies other than drinking are almost bound to be unhappy.
That’s a pretty low bar.
http://dailynous.com/2016/05/04/is-your-department-on-the-chopping-block/
Another thing that’s really hard is the difficulty of trying to be self-motivated when you can’t even be fired any more if you don’t publish much.
Let me give an analogy. I blog with a group of philosophers. I’m not sure how you feel about people promoting their own stuff on your blog post, but it is here: philpercs.com. It is a great group, and I really feel guilty about not blogging more. I mean, I have some time, and I have some ideas, but I won’t get fired from my job if I don’t blog. So, I just don’t get around to it. Then, I feel terribly guilty. And, it is a strange guilt because I could easily fix it: I just need to blog, and I have time and ideas. But I don’t. So, then, given how easy it is for me to fix and the fact that I don’t fix it, I feel even more guilty.
Anyway, it is a great blog. Please check it out: philpercs.com
Can we maybe get a post later about why philosophy bloggers are so unhappy? I’d do it myself, but I have plenty of time and ideas.
Anyway, check out the blog. Philpercs.com
Thanks for posting this! My father taught Wittgenstein at Rutgers for 35 years after growing up as a wild kid in the Everglades, a woodsman and fisherman in New England, and an absolutely unstoppable football player (the source of the scholarship that allowed him to swing up into the tenured teaching class). He loved teaching and Wittgenstein, but hated social (if academics can be called that) politics and most of his colleagues, and as doctorzamalek says above, he wasn’t going anywhere. The result was “deep and constant drinking”, disastrous gambling and a not much better string of marriages of which I am the product of the first. And the rest of the story is even worse, apart from fishing (his last literary effort was to self-publish a really good book about fishing as a metaphor for the meaning of life) and raising my half-brother and I, and he also really enjoyed chopping wood. His advice to me was, “Whatever you do, don’t teach.” I still don’t know what I think of that advice, but I followed it for better or worse.
Bill Mollison, author of the ecological design art known as permaculture, said, “If we lose the forests, we lose everything; if we lose the universities, we lose nothing,” and he was talking not only about ecology but about philosophy. He should know: he’s a former professor himself, but started out as a fisherman and logger. To him, you learn everything you need to know about philosophy from the sea, the woods, and gardening. Well, I’ve tried that, and permaculture is about as good for human/ecological relation as a full philosophy professorship is for finding the meaning of life. Mollison may be right that “To become a philosopher is not necessarily to be of benefit to one’s fellow beings,” but to be an ecological designer (at least of the kind we’ve mostly seen so far) is also not necessarily a more successful alternative.
The problems are mutually inverse. On the one hand, you can be a (very likely) miserable professor teaching amazing ways of thinking; on the other, you can amaze yourself in a perceived connection with “the land” (evidenced by the fact that there is often soil on your hands, in an ironically Johnsonian idealistic turn) while miserable ecological conditions worsen despite this enjoyable “connection” you feel.
What do I do? I write about ecological design blended with philosophy. This may lead to some powerful insights that may be of eventual use; in the meantime, it has forced me to become acquainted with both kinds of people, and the view from here…well, if I was to laugh, I would cry. I would kill to be where either of them are, and if I was, I would be of very little use to either myself (eventually, as even a happy gardener needs a biosphere to inhabit), other humans, or nonhumans. So I try to fuse them and see if they can balance each other. Why not? Worst case scenario, it’s as useless as the two of them apart.
Bottom line: I think that even though happiness can’t just come from yourself, you are the one who has to locate where it may be found, and very little anyone else can tell you about that will be of any use. Also, everyone I trust (from David Holmgren to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, including myself) says that being happy in the future is going to depend on valuing freedom over security, as “making a living” becomes more about taking advantage of irregular opportunities than about “steady jobs”. It’s also important to remember that for the vast majority of people (and life forms in general), this has always already been the case. Wake up and smell the third world slum out by the municipal garbage dump. Everybody says “Get a life,” like you even have any other choice; what they mean is, “If it sucks, get another one.” Wish I could imagine better advice.
Ha!
10 Anonymous People Insulting You on Social Media
There are many roads to unhappiness. I’m happiest when I get to do the things that attracted me to the job in the first place (teaching and research). Now, I feel that too much of my time and energy is spent doing admin. It’s frustrating because I feel so close to doing the things that I love, and yet they’re out of reach. In my contact, teaching and research should be 65% of my job. The reality is very different.
The admin is boring. It’s pointless. There’s so much of it. It’s what I thought I’d get away from by going into academia. And yet, there’s a sea of it. I feel guilty if I steal a few minutes away to think about an interesting philosophical issue. Reading something new feels like a luxury. I had hoped that when I was dead I’d either have research that people talked about or students that found our time together meaningful, but I think I’ll just leave behind a mountain of meaningless paperwork. I could kind of sort of see my way to doing a job that’s boring and meaningless, but I would hope that the pay would either be good enough to lead to things like home ownership and children or would give me enough free time for hobbies. I don’t really see how I can have either.
I mean, given that there’s a blog post roughly every three months about graduate student depression, I’m not sure I buy the premise, here. The fact THAT grads report such extraordinary levels of unhappiness and loneliness indicates that it probably isn’t a tenure thing. And it also indicates that academia does, indeed, attract the constitutionally unhappy.
I have been carrying the gospel of permission for pain for a while. It’s an evil of the shrinking profession that if you’re lucky enough to find job security in it, you’re discouraged from complaining (“You should be grateful you have a job” is oppressive), and a bad day is a bad day and illness is illness whether you make a few hundred dollars per class or a few thousand.
#3 above is the killer for me lately. Mid-career feels like a chain of endless failures stretching behind me and ahead of me, and when I devoted myself to teaching, I was assessed as not having a lot of research. I got tenure, but the assessment continues to be that I should publish more. Also teach more. And better. And online. And provide more service to the uni. And referee more. And chair everything that currently lacks leadership.
I feel really screwed.
boo hoo hoo you’ve got a well-paying job for life with regular sabbaticals and now you’re sad because you didn’t bother to develop any other interests, hobbies, skills, or a social life outside of your circle of colleagues. you spent 15 years jumping through hoops like a good little trained circus animal, and then you’re set free and you don’t know what to do because while submitting obediently to discipline and becoming a docile (no)body, you forgot to learn how to live. oh, the tragedy ! oh, the humanity !
If you’d only been around a few years ago to share that about the friend I mentioned above as me, his weeping mom, and brother went through his apartment the weekend after he died. That would have showed us.
I know you’re going through something yourself to write something like that. But please check yourself.
It’s nearly always possible to find someone who has it worse, and because of this what you are manifesting is a recipe for killing off all empathy.
That’s all cynicism does, finally. It was supposed to be an anti-hypocrisy virus, but since no virtue (like empathy) is ever complete (including integrity, the thing hypocrisy threatens), it pointlessly infects the autoimmune system of any virtuous thought, word or deed, and the cynic likes it that way. Who doesn’t like being unstoppable? That is, until one realizes that the virtue of integrity motivating cynicism is just another hypocrisy. You want to be the kid pointing at the silly naked man, but you’re actually the emperor wearing the invisible clothes. I agree with you Jon: they need to have a good cry and a laugh, and join the rest of us who admit we’re flawed and vulnerable.
This hits home. The two biggest things for me are that I miss philosophy being a social endeavor like it was in grad school. Some are lucky enough to end up in departments where it is. Most of us aren’t. The other thing is that I’m just not that convinced that philosophy as it’s taught in my and most universities is of any significant benefit to most of the students who have to take it — some, yes, and if we had decent primary and secondary education and adequate public funding of universities, I’d probably think differently, but when I know 60% of the first years in my intro classes are borrowing money to take the class and won’t end up with a degree, it’s hard for me to think that I’m not horribly exploiting them. So, while I like the lifestyle philosophy affords me, it doesn’t seem to have much beyond that to recommend it, and by the time one is tenure age, other paths are exceedingly difficult to follow.
sorry about your friend, but he died because of depression (it seems), not because of tenure. and depression is a serious illness that does kill, and we should not make light of it. but it’s a different issue. there’s no evidence to suggest a causal link, or even a correlation, between the acquisition of tenure and the onset of devastating depression. mere unhappiness or malaise is not the same as depression, and depression ought never be confused with “the blues”. if tenured profs are merely “unsatisfied” or “unhappy,” as the title and the anecdotal evidence of your post suggest, then again i say, boo hoo, and i won’t “check myself” or “revise my tone” (which is not your phrase but someone else’s) about that. but if you want to have a serious conversation about the horrors of depression and how it impacts the lives of millions of people, not just academics, then I would be a very sympathetic and engaged partner in dialogue.
I’m sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re being even more offensive here. You didn’t know either my dead friend or my friend who was institutionalized after getting tenure (who quit academia) nor my other friends who started taking happy pills for the first time in their lives after getting tenure.
If you really want to “have a conversation” about “the horrors of depression” maybe start by not crapping up internet discussions mocking people for being friendless and anti-social and who don’t have cool hobbies like you? Maybe not call people nobodies and circus animals? And you certainly should not assume that you have the infallible ability to differentiate whether a person falls under the metaphysical kind “having the blues” (and who thus deserves to be mocked for being lonely, uncool, etc.) versus “being clinically depressed” (and who you can then gaslight by dismissing their own and their actual therapists’ reports of the causes of that depression).
Seriously, please go back and read what you wrote. If you didn’t at some level realize it was shameful you would have used one of your normal internet tags that your facebook and real life friends associate with you.
When you run a blog you do see IP addresses and the set of the poster’s previous internet comments from that address, even if they use different names. When we set up this blog we agreed that such information would always be kept private, and it is. I’m working like an idiot here not to write anything identifying about you and also working like an idiot (given our history) to be charitable. But seriously, check yourself; you’re entering bad karma territory here.
I’m out on this. Please know that any response you make will be the last word as far as me responding in public.
I think Jon might be a little hasty in writing off this comment. Surely it’s at least logically possible that someone with the obvious mental acuity that Vartan exhibits (not to even mention his magisterial grasp of punctuation) could grasp the fundamental essence of a dead person’s psychological afflictions merely by reading a paragraph about him on the internet.
We could be witnessing the birth of a new super power here! Sort of like that guy in the X-Men who shoots laser beans with his eyes, except having more to do with clinical psychology.
Great piece– thank you! Here’s a suggestion for one (not the only possible) reason tenured faculty might be more unhappy than one would expect. Academics live in a world dominated by hierarchy. I know, in some sense everyone does, but I think this is especially the case in academia. There’s always a higher rank, a more prestigious university, a colleague who publishes more and gets talked about more. I improved my happiness (at least a little) by deciding I was going to stay where I was and worry as little as possible about the people above me on the ladder. Admittedly, though, that’s still a work in progress.
I chalk it up mostly to #1, because that’s the only condition that changes when one gets tenure. The other 7 are presumably true throughout a person’s career. But I would look at the issue not in terms of freedom but of adversity — adversity as a BENEFIT, that the tenured faculty (or the miserable lottery winner) abruptly LOSES. Adversity is what gives life meaning, improves us as people, and (paradoxically) creates happiness. You are a knife and adversity is the rock against which you sharpen yourself. Not necessarily because we need a sharp knife, but because a knife is best when it’s at its most knife-like. Heirs, except when they reject or are excommunicated from the family fortune, usually have no concept of adversity and grow up to be shitty, weak people. They never have to strive and hence never learn what they’re made of. Once you get tenure, that is what you lose.
> If a couple of hundred people read this blog post (optimistic), that will be more than have read several papers that it’s taken me years to write.
Some of your papers looked interesting (Ontological emergence, platonic nature of TMs), but were paywalled off.
It’s really cool that more people are putting links to all of their offprints on their web pages. I think that some universities are requiring that now? If and when I get all my crap together to go up for full professor, I’m going to try to do something like that. If everyone did it then things would be better. Right now I’m slowly adding stuff to academia.edu.
My two heroes in this regard are Jonathan Schaffer (http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/) and Jessica Wilson (http://individual.utoronto.ca/jmwilson/). It’s fantastic to have all that great stuff so easily available. In the next five years or so I’m going to teach classes on each of them.
In my experience nearly everybody’s happy to send their own work over e-mail, but it’s a bit of a problem because you end up feeling really guilty if someone e-mails you their paper and then you don’t have time to get around to it. It’s much better to be able to peruse stuff on the web.
I can’t imagine them being more unhappy than a grad student that has question marks in every facet of their lives (and where 1-8 hold for most of them as well), for instance where they will live, if they will end up doing philosophy beyond the PhD, what they in fact will do if not for Philosophy, etc.
I’m not trying to say that tenured philosophy profs are not happy or that they should be happy. Only that if we focus on the unhappiness of graduate students we may arrive at a more concrete answer to the question you raise in the piece.
Nice post, Jon!
Thank you for this post. This is a problem I’ve been thinking about since I was a grad student (and that’s a long way back).
I’ve come to think that so many philosophers are unhappy precisely *because* we get to live examined lives. When you examine a human life, even (or especially) a privileged one, you see how little significance it has, not just long-term but even short-term. This finding bumps up against the seeming importance and urgency that philosophical problems have for us. So, we are devoting our lives to what appear to be highly significant issues, yet we recognize ourselves (and our work) as pretty insignificant.
Great post. Had similar thoughts – no surprise, got tenured a month ago. For me, #1 explains the most. I had eventually lost total interest in most issues of philosophy before getting tenure, but at that point, it would have been a waste not to go ahead and accomplish the mission (anything else would have been worse…). I first got bored by stupid scholasticism prevalent in contemporary philosophy, the was annoyed by it, but now I do not care whatsoever. I do not any longer read most of the papers and books I cite (abstracts are more than enough in most cases). Do not bother too much about students either. I give them somewhat better grades so that I do not have to argue (or even read their papers discussing mostly extremely boring technical no-problems). Having said this, there are still philosophical problems that interest me a lot. But unfortunately this is just 1 percent of the totally irrelevant and boring scholasticism that I teach. And publishing is also a total waste of time. Not that I do not have interesting thoughts (or at least, so I hope), I just hate the scholarly format (literature review and all that bullshit). But as I do not have much of the issues beyond #1, it is a nice job, after all. I do not spend more than 20 hours a week with the boring part (including teaching, students, administration and all the rest), so I have plenty time for meaningful things. Friends, family, reading interesting stuff (mostly outside philosophy).
But anonymous @ 32–Jon’s post is about unhappiness–and you seem to embody a happy (enough) attitude of entitled place that Republicans in my state have used to pummel tenure and diminish it as just such a mere entitlement. But ours is a profession. We have fiduciary duties to our students–and, if employed by the state, to the public. If you do not feel that way–at least about what you owe to students–then I not only feel sorry for you, but I feel sorry especially for them.
I have another. once the struggle to ‘make it’ and have a good position is secure, and once one does philosophy long enough the way it functions as a coping/psychological strategy and as pretense gets old, then one is just who one is and knows the limits of ones knowing. cynicism and despair then emerge, and if one doesn’t acknowledge it and work towards some form of wisdom, one becomes depressed, sometimes turning to drink, sex, or other distraction. to make philosophy part of a meaningful life is the challenge there, but flies in the face of philosophy as a profession. when similar things happen in other professions one can turn to philosophy [or religion], but where to turn when the thing that has run its course is philosophy?
C’mon. “We have fiduciary duties to our students–and, if employed by the state, to the public.” I do my job not any worse than any public officials. So, formally, I would be find in terms of my obligations even if I was employed by a state university (I am not, so the income I have is not from tax money, luckily). But your words suggest that philosophers have a mission much beyond working 8 hours and correcting papers – a duty to enlighten or, at least, spiritually enrich the public. This I consider as watery bullshit. I know, this is how many like to imagine the committed scientist in general, and philosophers more particularly: working 16 hours a day for something really important. This is the image of the modern scientist, a weird mix of protestant work ethic and do-goodism. I would not generalize, but for philosophers, it is maintained in order to justify the status of the otherwise socially totally irrelevant and useless philosopher. There is no public interest in another totally boring and uninventive study in Aristotle’s poetics, Kant’s philosophy of religition, etc. Most of the papers and books we produce are not even read by our colleagues, and even in the case of more important stuff, the actual core is very little. Even the good books in philosophy are superfluous – they should have been published as journal articles, but because of the publication expectations at universities, we need to expand everything into completely unreadable books (rather than writing good and interesting articles that could possible attract some readership).
Well, after all, stoicism and cynicism can be done on a philosophical level too.
Great topic and a nice list of possibilities. I want to add one though.
I think I have a bit of survivor’s guilt. We all know that our tenured jobs are a gift of sorts; only 50% of people who enter grad school will finish. Of those who finish, I don’t know how many actually get jobs in the field. But we do know that right now, only about 30% of those who get jobs are tenure/tenure-track professors. Over 200 people applied for the job I have, and I’m sure many of them were just as qualified as I was. I made some good choices in grad school by always volunteering to teach important applied ethics topics (e.g. business ethics), which led to a full time job that included teaching biomedical ethics, which led to my current tenured job. Even so, there was almost certainly some luck involved.
So I think that every time I’m not fully taking advantage of what I’ve been given, or even those times when I’m just less than appreciative (complaining about committee work or advising or whatever), I feel some guilt. There are lots of people who have given everything they have to get a job like mine, even though I’m teaching 4/4 at a small liberal arts university, and not at a major research institution. I prefer my setting, since I get to interact with students more, but my point is that many people out there would kill for this job (hopefully not literally, but you know what I mean!). How dare I complain about a 2 hour meeting that seems like a waste of time, or having to overload my classes a bit to accommodate students.
I end up beating myself up over these kinds of things. I could always be doing more, taking better advantage of my time and my opportunities. I could be more appreciative of what I have, etc. So I feel a constant guilt about this, usually low level, but almost always in the background of my life in some way.
1, 3, 5, and 6 factor into my life as well. Not sure about 7 though. I’m not rude, and I dress well. Are most philosophy professors today walking around like a modern day Socrates? I didn’t know that.