outstanding features : Work more than you ever will in your life but earn a petty wage :angry-place: Academia is full of elders who formed a caste system which it will take you years to enter, if you even can. The pursuit of knowledge is secondary to funding concerns. :mao-shining: become alienated from your fellow workers :no-workers: be crushed by 18-wheeler on your way to Uni :no-carnism:
im done
I'm at an institution where the ostensibly "marxist" faculty told graduate students who were out of teaching "tough shit" during the first months of COVID.
Would love for real working class Marxists like Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams to take over the academy again. Instead we have a bunch of professor's kids (the sheer amount of prof kids in the academy actually blows my minds) who think that everything's cool.
:matt-jokerfied:
I am taking courses in community college in the spring because my job offers tuition reimbursement and also I want to do something with my life instead of rotting away in my dark bedroom feeling bad about myself forever
I always encourage US people to take some community college courses, if your job pays for it even better. Even if your teachers are all libs, you can get a lot out of it.
I am taking biological anthropology because my mental illnesses have left me obsessed with the mechanics of how human brains, bodies, and societies :joker-gaming: interact to make a person, intro to philosophy so I can intend to read Hegel even harder, voice and diction because people keep complimenting my voice and I keep killing it at karaoke, and creative writing to get myself to fucking produce. That last one is the one that terrifies me, since as we all know, if I write a Bad Story, it means I am a Bad Person, and the first draft must be perfect immediately, so the clearest path to my dream of being an author is to never write anything ever because it might be bad :very-smart:
This is a slight tangent, but I'm having a hard time not being extremely angry at the "academia lifestyle people" because a family friend who is very much that decided to scream atrocious takes at my mother at the dinner table until she got up and left.
These people have terminal New York times brain and live in a bubble where if they don't agree with you the first time you should just scream at them until they get it.
These people have terminal New York times brain and live in a bubble where if they don’t agree with you the first time you should just scream at them until they get it.
:angery: I'm bad at arguing okay
Oh that's fine, just don't yell at my mother at the dinner table :cat-confused:
no problem, dinner tables are for awkward silences
Once upon a time I was on track to become a linguist. Had a doctoral program lined up and everything. Then I had a breakdown after I started publishing research because I realized nearly all of what gets published is extraneous bullshit. So much intentional filler, only good for the petty ego games academics are constantly playing with each other. The best most work can hope for is to be passed around by a couple liberal boomers, who nod at it for a few seconds before throwing it in some bottomless archive, never to see the light of day again.
Anyway I flunked out and went back to working retail.
Some child of a professor I know from uni and I talked, she was doing linguistic research (which can be good). More specifically about the efficiency of phrases and slang depending on target demographic (think gender, age, income, academic status) in advertisement for luxury brands and I mentioned that I feel that people who actually do work in a super market do deliver more labor beneficial to most people, when she diminished people driving buses (who wants to do that?).
Like work doesn't have to be good, but work that is academic doesn't make it better than filling needed tasks (of stocking, ordering, unpacking etc. goods).
I'm in a doctoral program for computer science because I want to do research (and I'm disabled so I'd like to avoid dealing with techbro ablist nonsense). I enjoy it but man everything you said is correct.
i went to college for 7 years just to get the same job and same pay as my boss's son
Well at least then you get to live in the isekai light novel
I Was Crushed By An 18-Wheeler Only To Find That Nobility Is An Even More Arcane Power Structure Than Academics!
Love when boomer relatives tell my partner to just get a job teaching because they know a 70yo tenured professor that makes 6 figures and think anyone with a PhD can stumble into that. Then my partner gets to diligently and systemically explain why that's not possible and be met with a blank stare, and next time we all get together the exact same conversation happens
almost dying on the way to college because of the traffic low key made me wanna drop out several times
