Mandatory Self-Assessment, 2022
Featuring some tenuous analogies to rabbits who chase carrots
Getting the Balance Right
This was a year of personal growth and confrontation with my own limitations.
For example, this year (this very morning, in fact) I decided against an essay on, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Nepo Baby”. No one in my family thought this would end well. And, anyway, what is there to say about academic nepo babies from a parental point of view, really? What a depressing commentary on our jobs and parenting if, after raising kids for 18 years, they go out into the world and think the last thing they want to do with their lives is be like us. Even stranger if we parents refuse to share our accumulated perspective or understanding and withhold all advice and support as our children navigate whatever professional path they’ve chosen.
That’s the personal growth anecdote.
Sadly, this year I also didn’t complete (or even find time to really start) my magnum opus, which I have tentatively titled, “Dirty Limericks for Babies”. If I can ever manage to write it, I feel this children’s board book—featuring short poems about diapers, dirty laundry and probably spit-up—may well be my most enduring and impactful literary contribution.
I want to be clear that the limitation in this case is time constraints and not my ability to compose dirty limericks.
The Requisite Retrospective
I’m looking over my resolutions for 2022 and want to be sure you hear it from me first: this was, in many ways, a year of failure. In fact, looking at my list of goals, the only one I accomplished is to close some browser tabs on my laptop.
To summarize: I still don’t have a will. I also didn’t get a new tattoo or plan my 50th birthday celebration, which is now mere months away. I didn’t meet my running goals. Nor did I climb the Eiffel Tower by stairs. (This, it turns out, is the Eiffel Tower’s fault and not mine, but who am I to point fingers?)
And let’s just get this one out of the way: I didn’t hike 160 Munros in 2022.
It’s important to be positive, though. So here are some things I did achieve this year:
An awful lot of desk lunches. Too many to count. Cumulatively consumed five pounds of Trader Joe’s almonds at my office desk for a snack after eating Icelandic yoghurts spiked with Alpen muesli that didn’t quite fill me up.
An involuntary tripling of my social media presence. Ask me anything about Mastodon or Post.
A calm and mature perspective when one of my kids decided to smoke an illegal plant substance in his bedroom while I was downstairs in the kitchen.
Also: some evenings1, when I texted home to say I was leaving the office, I actually did it.
Same for the pub on Friday nights.
Did my job2: taught, wrote three grant proposals, published a co-edited volume that had been in the works since before the pandemic, mentored PhD students and post-docs, published some papers, worked on a seminar and interview series with colleague friends, gave talks, went to conferences and organised sessions, fulfilled obligations on funded research projects, edited an excellent journal.
Exercised agency and applied for jobs when confronted with impending professional frustration and burnout. (10/10 can recommend.)
The Carrot Portion of the Essay (feel free to skip)
The analogy I used with a friend recently is that I am like a rabbit trained to chase carrots. Tell me something is a carrot and I’ll chase it round and round the track until I catch it, without ever pausing to consider whether I even like the taste of carrots. This must be a common mid-career affliction, perhaps especially for academics. I’ve got it bad.
Maybe we start off liking carrots—research and the grant proposals and publishing that go along with getting our efforts out into the world—but eventually we are trained to chase the carrots simply because they’re there to be chased.
As we settle into our careers, from a distance, the carrots look ever bigger and tastier—and everywhere we look, there are rabbits who seem to be even faster than we are. Before we know it, we eat, sleep and breathe carrot chasing.
In addition, some of us like racing by nature. This is probably me. This is a recipe for eventual exhaustion.
Tl;dr: In 2022 I learned that aside from possibly disliking carrots, I’m not even sure I like racing. This is a harder problem to address, since it’s almost certainly hard-wired into my character. Tell me how awesome radish-chasing is (or Munro bagging), and I’m liable to take off after those instead.
Resolutions for 2023
More fun, more relaxation, more Munros and perhaps some radishes.
After fact-checking, my editor insisted I change the original “most” to “some”.
Actually, by one commonly-employed accounting measure (i.e., our official “workload model”, I did 138% of my job.