As someone who has just left academia (law prof), this post really resonates. I found that academia sucked me dry and that I did not have the bandwidth (mental, physical, emotional) to think and communicate as I wished about my interests. Am hoping to cobble together income somehow, as I don't have the 'someone else funding my life and my children's lives' option. Will be interested to see what you figure out!
Thank you for reading and I'm glad the post resonated. I'll be curious to see where your explorations take you, too--and I've enjoying coming across your work recently and starting to learn from it! For my living the past five years, I've gone with the day job & career models I discuss, but hoping to find the time and positioning to think about how to best "bet on myself" as well.
In my own (well-paying) career, I did not find any sort of synergy developing between my line of work and my interests outside it. This meant that there were no overlaps (apart from drafting emails) where I could play these two spheres of activity against each other.
But paradoxically, having a demanding career made it easier in some ways pursue what I wanted, i.e. to write, because my mind-bowl would be empty after a day's work, ready to be filled by things I was excited by.
Today, in contrast, I am "doing what I love" full-time, but the quality of attention and excitement has degraded. With the erosion of the work-passion compartmentalization, everything seems to meld into an inchoate "things to be done" list: writing an article, getting a haircut, going for a jog, fixing the leak, meeting friends, everything becomes a set of interchangeable tasks-to-do.
Sorry for the late reply, Srikanth! I think you point out a really useful thing - that when a labor of love also becomes a kind of duty, it can have an unfortunate dulling effect. There can be a 'grass is greener' problem - those who pursue art, etc., only in their spare time envy the time and freedom of those who do it as a job, while those who do it as a job likely have a lot of constraints and expectations that don't burden the part-timer.
As someone who has just left academia (law prof), this post really resonates. I found that academia sucked me dry and that I did not have the bandwidth (mental, physical, emotional) to think and communicate as I wished about my interests. Am hoping to cobble together income somehow, as I don't have the 'someone else funding my life and my children's lives' option. Will be interested to see what you figure out!
Thank you for reading and I'm glad the post resonated. I'll be curious to see where your explorations take you, too--and I've enjoying coming across your work recently and starting to learn from it! For my living the past five years, I've gone with the day job & career models I discuss, but hoping to find the time and positioning to think about how to best "bet on myself" as well.
So good!
In my own (well-paying) career, I did not find any sort of synergy developing between my line of work and my interests outside it. This meant that there were no overlaps (apart from drafting emails) where I could play these two spheres of activity against each other.
But paradoxically, having a demanding career made it easier in some ways pursue what I wanted, i.e. to write, because my mind-bowl would be empty after a day's work, ready to be filled by things I was excited by.
Today, in contrast, I am "doing what I love" full-time, but the quality of attention and excitement has degraded. With the erosion of the work-passion compartmentalization, everything seems to meld into an inchoate "things to be done" list: writing an article, getting a haircut, going for a jog, fixing the leak, meeting friends, everything becomes a set of interchangeable tasks-to-do.
Sorry for the late reply, Srikanth! I think you point out a really useful thing - that when a labor of love also becomes a kind of duty, it can have an unfortunate dulling effect. There can be a 'grass is greener' problem - those who pursue art, etc., only in their spare time envy the time and freedom of those who do it as a job, while those who do it as a job likely have a lot of constraints and expectations that don't burden the part-timer.