As I found myself reading these articles over the past few months, I noticed that I was thinking less about fashion than about the phrase take up less space. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure why those ideas felt connected. One is about bodies and beauty standards. The other is about the way we move through professional and social environments. But the more I sat with the idea, the more I realized they seemed to share an underlying logic. Both are built on subtle messages about visibility, belonging, and the kinds of people who are rewarded for becoming a little quieter, a little more agreeable, and a little more accommodating to everyone else.

I remember feeling that instinct particularly strongly while I was completing my Master of Arts. It was a department where bullying was common enough that most students quickly learned who to avoid, when to stay quiet, and which conversations were safest to observe rather than join. No one ever explained these rules outright. They were simply part of the culture. Over time, I noticed that I had begun adapting to that environment in ways I did not fully recognize until much later.

I became more cautious about speaking in seminars unless I was certain I had the “right” answer (and I became increasingly less certain as time went on). I softened disagreements before expressing them. I reread emails several times to make sure they sounded agreeable rather than too direct. Even when I felt confident in an idea, I found myself weighing whether contributing was worth the possibility of becoming more visible than I wanted to be.

Looking back, I do not think I was responding to academia in general so much as to a particular institutional culture. Many departments cultivate generosity, curiosity, and intellectual risk-taking. Mine often felt defined by uncertainty about who might become the next target. In that kind of environment, taking up less space becomes less of a personality trait and more of a strategy. It’s difficult to contribute freely when you are also trying to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention.

That experience has stayed with me because I have since noticed versions of the same instinct appearing in places that seem, at first glance, entirely unrelated. The conversation around the return of “heroin chic” is one example. Although it’s framed as a discussion about fashion or celebrity culture, it also reflects a broader expectation that many women have encountered in different forms throughout their lives: that there is value in becoming smaller. Sometimes that message is directed at our bodies. Other times, it is directed at our voices, our ambitions, or the amount of room we allow ourselves to occupy in professional spaces.

Academia, of course, does not tell women to lose weight. But it can reward another kind of shrinking. There is often an unspoken expectation that confidence should be carefully calibrated, that disagreement should be softened, and that ambition should never become too visible. Women and scholars from marginalized communities frequently describe walking a narrow line between being seen as knowledgeable and being seen as difficult, between advocating for their work and being perceived as self-promotional. These expectations are not written into policy, of course, yet they often become part of the hidden curriculum of academic life.

One of the ironies is that universities often imagine themselves as places where ideas exist independently of the people presenting them. We like to believe that evidence, rigour, and intellectual merit rise above the biases that shape the rest of society. Yet universities are still human institutions, and human institutions inevitably carry the assumptions, stereotypes, and power dynamics of the cultures in which they exist. Those dynamics don’t disappear simply because they are expressed through the language of collegiality or professionalism rather than fashion or beauty.

Taking a break from academia has made me realize how much of this instinct I carried with me. Even now, I catch myself apologizing before asking a question or softening an opinion before expressing it. These habits are remarkably persistent because they are learned gradually. They become ways of navigating a particular culture, and by the time we recognize them, they often feel less like strategies and more like parts of our personality.

Perhaps that’s why the conversation about “heroin chic” has lingered with me. It’s not because I think fashion trends and academic culture are the same thing. But they both reveal something about the kinds of behaviours our culture continues to reward. Whether we’re talking about bodies or ideas, women and marginalized people are often encouraged to become just a little smaller, a little quieter, and a little easier to accommodate.

I find myself wondering what would happen if we stopped treating that instinct as inevitable. What would academia look like if confidence did not need to be softened before it was expressed? What kinds of conversations might emerge if more people felt able to occupy intellectual space without first worrying about how much of it they were taking up?

Those questions seem far more interesting to me than whether one fashion trend has returned. The real issue has never been about clothing or body types. It has always been about who is permitted to take up space, and who is quietly (or violently) encouraged to disappear into the background.

Not because the candidate was not excellent. Often, the opposite is true. The strongest candidates can sometimes generate the most disagreement because different committee members may value different things. One person may prioritize a particular research area, another may be thinking about teaching needs, and someone else may be considering how a candidate fits into the longer-term direction of the department.

Everyone arrives at the table with their own idea of the ideal candidate, and then the process of negotiation begins.

I thought about this story after recently writing about academic job advertisements and the experience of applying to positions with hundreds of other candidates. In that essay, I reflected on how job searches often appear more straightforward from the outside than they actually are. A position is posted, applications are submitted, a committee reviews candidates, and one person receives an offer. But academic hiring is rarely that simple.

When hundreds of people apply for a single position, it can be easy to imagine the process as a ranking system. There is a pool of candidates, each with their qualifications and accomplishments, and eventually the strongest person rises to the top. We are encouraged to think about hiring this way because it makes the process feel predictable: if we publish enough, teach enough, and build a strong enough profile, then eventually the right opportunity will come along.

And sometimes it does. But behind every job offer is a much more complicated process than simply identifying the “best” candidate.

A hiring committee is made up of people with different experiences, priorities, and ideas about what a department needs. The candidate who seems like the perfect choice to one committee member may not be the person another member believes will best serve the department. One person may be looking for someone who expands a particular area of research. Another may be thinking about teaching needs, program development, or future directions for the department.

These considerations are not necessarily signs that the process is unfair. Departments do need to make decisions about what kinds of expertise they want to bring into their communities. Hiring is, by necessity, a process of imagining what a department should become. But it also means that academic hiring is shaped by conversations and judgments that applicants never see.

The job advertisement provides one version of what a department is looking for. It lists qualifications, research areas, and expectations. What applicants do not see are the discussions happening behind the scenes: what committee members hope to prioritize, what gaps they are trying to address, what compromises are made, and how different visions for the future are negotiated.

This is also why the language of “fit” can be so complicated. On one hand, fit can describe something meaningful. A candidate’s research may complement existing strengths. Their teaching experience may address a departmental need. Their approach may bring something new to a program.

On the other hand, fit can be difficult for applicants to understand because it often refers to factors that are not fully visible from the outside. Two candidates may both be highly qualified, but one may align more closely with what a committee has collectively decided it needs at that particular moment.

The result is that academic hiring can feel much more personal than it actually is. When someone applies for dozens of positions and receives repeated rejections, it is easy to interpret those outcomes as evidence that they are not good enough, that their research is not strong enough, or that they somehow failed to become the kind of scholar institutions are looking for. But hiring decisions rarely work that cleanly.

A candidate can be highly qualified and still not be the person a committee chooses. Another candidate can receive an offer not because they were objectively better than everyone else, but because their work, experience, and perspective aligned with what that department needed at that particular time.

The same is true of the candidate who receives the offer. They may not have been everyone’s first choice. They may not have been the candidate every committee member would have selected individually. Instead, they may have been the person who allowed the committee to reach agreement.

Perhaps this is one of the hardest things to understand about academic hiring: the person who gets the job is not always the person who was universally considered the strongest candidate. Hiring decisions are shaped by merit, but they are also shaped by institutional priorities, timing, disciplinary perspectives, and the dynamics of a group of people trying to make a collective decision.

A rejection is often not a statement about whether someone belongs in academia. It is the result of a complex process involving many people, competing priorities, and decisions that applicants will never fully see.

Understanding that does not make rejection easy. But it does make the process a little more understandable.

And perhaps that is one of the most important things we can learn about academic hiring: sometimes the person who gets the job is not the person everyone wanted most.

Sometimes they are simply the person everyone could agree on.

There are currently over 200 wildfires raging throughout northwestern Ontario.

For days now, I've watched footage of those fires with the same sinking feeling that many Canadians have probably experienced. Families climbing into boats with whatever they could carry. Communities wondering whether there will be anything left to return to. Entire trains are surrounded by smoke and flame.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=onxw37tglAY&si=B7KNuLBmS7LmsVRq

This isn't happening elsewhere. It isn't a disaster unfolding in another country that we can scroll past before moving on with our day. This is Ontario. (And, frankly, with fires spreading across the country, this is Canada).

And once again, the communities paying the highest price are Indigenous communities in the province's north.

There’s something uncomfortable about how we consume disasters. When smoke drifts over Toronto, Ottawa, or, goddess forbid, New York, the story suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. Air quality worsens and social media becomes flooded with images of hazy, orange skies. Americans complain that Canada should "do something" about the smoke. Politicians rush to television cameras.

But for many communities in northwestern Ontario, the emergency began long before southern skies turned hazy.

It's tempting to describe this as another bad wildfire season because that framing lets all of us off the hook.

But this isn't simply a story about wildfires. It's a story about climate change. It's a story about who bears the costs of political decisions. And it's a story about what governments choose to prepare for—and what they choose to ignore. Most importantly for my post today, it's a policy story.

Because while politicians are happy to trade barbs with Donald Trump after he complained about smoke drifting into the United States, there has been remarkably little sustained scrutiny of whether Ontario has actually prepared itself for the wildfire seasons that climate scientists have been warning about for years.

The Politics of Smoke

As thousands of people across northwestern Ontario were evacuating their homes, as military aircraft ferried families to safety, and as entire communities waited to learn whether they would have anything left to return to, the story suddenly became... smoke.

Not the smoke in Atikokan or Fort Francis. Not the smoke forcing First Nations families onto evacuation flights.

The smoke over New York. The smoke over Chicago. The smoke over Washington.

When Donald Trump suggested that smoke drifting across the border should become part of his tariff rhetoric, the media cycle eagerly followed him there. Doug Ford was quick with a response, accusing Trump of trying to politicize a natural disaster and reminding Americans that Ontario has repeatedly sent firefighters and resources south when the United States has needed help. (Think: the annual California wildfires).

On that point, Ford was right.

Canada has consistently provided assistance to the United States during wildfire seasons, just as American crews have crossed the border to help Canadians when our own resources have been stretched. Wildfire response has long depended on cooperation rather than nationalism.

But while the cameras were focused on Ford's exchange with Trump, I found myself wondering why another conversation wasn't happening with the same intensity.

Why wasn't every microphone in the Premier's face asking about Ontario's wildfire preparedness?

Why wasn't every press conference dominated by questions about whether the province has adequately planned for a future that scientists have been describing for decades?

Why weren't journalists asking why Ontario budgeted $135 million for emergency forest firefighting in 2025 only to spend $271 million by the end of the season, before increasing the allocation to just $150 million this year despite increasingly severe fire seasons?

Why wasn't anyone asking what Ontario's long-term climate adaptation strategy actually looks like?

In politics, we often mistake performance for leadership. We reward the politician with the sharpest comeback, the quickest soundbite, the viral clip that dominates the evening news. Ford's response to Trump fit neatly into that script. It projected strength. It defended Ontario. It generated headlines.

But governing well is not the same thing as performing.

Leadership is not measured by how effectively a premier responds to an inflammatory comment from an American president. It is measured by whether governments prepare for crises before they happen, whether they listen to scientific evidence even when it is politically inconvenient, and whether they invest in protecting the people who will bear the greatest risks. And that is where this story becomes much harder for the Ford government.

Because these fires did not arrive without warning. Scientists have spent years telling governments that climate change would produce hotter summers, drier forests, longer fire seasons, and more extreme wildfires. Emergency planners have repeatedly warned that the demands placed on wildfire crews would continue to grow. Northern and Indigenous communities have been living this reality for years.

Yet every summer somehow brings another "unprecedented" wildfire season. Another round of evacuations. Another declaration that this year's fires are unlike anything we've seen before.

At some point, "unprecedented" stops being an anomaly and starts becoming the baseline.

And if that's true—as the science increasingly suggests it is—then governments should no longer be budgeting, staffing, and planning as though these are extraordinary events.

The smoke crossing into the United States may have made for compelling political theatre.

But the real story is in the uncomfortable possibility that, after years of insufficient funding and increasingly destructive fire seasons, Ontario's political conversation is still more interested in reacting to the smoke than confronting the policies that determine how prepared we are when the fires inevitably come.

As I write this, families still don't know whether they'll have homes to return to. Children are sleeping hundreds of kilometres from the communities where they grew up. Elders have been forced to leave the places that hold generations of memory.

They deserve more than our sympathy. They deserve governments that plan for the future we already know is here. Governments that listen to scientists. Governments that take seriously the caretaking of our land and our health.

I said at the beginning that this was a detour from academia. Maybe it wasn't.

One of the questions that has always interested me as a literary scholar is whose stories get told, whose suffering becomes visible, and whose lives are treated as peripheral to the national narrative. Literature teaches us to pay attention to what is pushed to the margins.

So perhaps this wasn't a detour after all. Perhaps it was simply another lesson in paying attention.

Because long after the smoke clears over Toronto, long after Donald Trump has found something else to talk about, and long after the television cameras have packed up and moved on, people in northwestern Ontario will still be rebuilding their lives.

The least the rest of us can do is refuse to look away.

Share

How you can help

If you're wondering what to do after reading this, consider donating to organizations supporting wildfire evacuees in northwestern Ontario. I recommend the Canadian Red Cross' Canadian Wildfire Fund for emergency relief, or Indigenous-led organizations such as True North Aid and the Mikinakoos Children's Fund, which are working directly with First Nations communities affected by these fires. Even a small donation can help provide food, clothing, emergency accommodation, and long-term recovery for families who have lost their homes.

Sources:

CBC News. Ontario Seeks Federal Help for Wildfire Evacuations as Fires Threaten Northern Communities.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-federal-help-wildfire-evacuations-9.7272329

Ontario New Democratic Party. NDP Urges Ford Government to Reverse Cuts as Northern Ontario Wildfires Force Evacuations.

https://www.ontariondp.ca/news/ndp-urges-ford-government-reverse-cuts-northern-ontario-wildfires-force-evacuations

Government of Canada. The Government of Canada Provides an Update Regarding the 2026 Wildfire Season – July Update. Public Safety Canada, 9 July 2026, https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2026/07/the-government-of-canada-provides-an-update-regarding-the-2026-wildfire-season--july-update.html

Reuters. Ontario Premier Says Trump's Criticism of Canada's Efforts to Stop Wildfires Is "Absolutely Unacceptable."Reuters, 18 July 2026, https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/canada-prepares-evacuate-ontario-community-wildfire-smoke-chokes-us-2026-07-18/on

So I did what academics do when they see a promising job posting. I read the description carefully, analyzed the language, revised my cover letter, adjusted my research statement, and tried to articulate my teaching philosophy in a way that was both genuine and responsive to what the committee might be looking for.

Then I submitted the application.

Later, I learned that more than 500 people had applied for the position.

This is one of the stranger realities of academic hiring: from the outside, the process often appears much more straightforward than it is. A job is advertised, applications are submitted, a committee reviews candidates, interviews are conducted, and someone is selected. The language of the job posting suggests an open competition where the strongest candidate will emerge from a large pool of qualified applicants.

And sometimes that is exactly what happens.

But academic hiring also has layers that are difficult to see from the outside. Sometimes a search is shaped by institutional knowledge and relationships that applicants cannot see. A department may already have someone in mind—not necessarily because the process is intentionally unfair, but because institutions are built on familiarity, experience, and forms of trust that are difficult to capture through a job advertisement. There may be a contract faculty member who has taught in the department for several years, a visiting scholar whose work colleagues already know well, or a candidate whose research has become closely connected to the department’s existing priorities.

At other times, the uncertainty begins even before the advertisement is posted. Some job calls are broad because departments are genuinely trying to imagine what kind of scholar they want to hire. They may be replacing a position that has changed over time, responding to shifting institutional needs, or struggling to agree on what expertise would best serve their future direction. The result is a posting that feels open to almost anything: a call for a scholar who could work in multiple areas, bring new perspectives, and somehow fit a set of criteria that are not always clearly defined.

For applicants, these broad calls can be both exciting and frustrating. They create the impression of possibility, but they also make it difficult to know what a department is actually looking for. How do you tailor an application when the position itself seems uncertain?

There are also the less comfortable realities that academia does not always like to acknowledge. Despite its self-image as a space dedicated to intellectual rigor and critical thinking, universities are still institutions made up of people. Academic hiring is not immune from the biases that shape decision-making everywhere else. Prestige matters. Institutional reputation matters. A candidate from a highly ranked university may receive a level of attention or credibility that someone with equally strong work from a less recognized institution may not. Networks, familiarity, and assumptions about what counts as “excellent” can all influence how candidates are perceived.

None of this means that the person selected is undeserving. Often, they are excellent candidates who have earned their place through years of work. The challenge is that applicants rarely know the full context in which they are competing. They see the advertisement, the criteria, and the invitation to apply, but they do not always see the institutional conversations, priorities, assumptions, and histories shaping the search behind the scenes.

This is one of the most difficult parts of academic hiring: the process asks candidates to treat every opportunity as a genuine possibility, even when there are many factors influencing the outcome that remain invisible.

And so we apply.

Again and again.

Not because we believe every position is guaranteed to be ours, but because academic careers are built on the possibility that the next opportunity might be the one that works out. The system depends, in part, on that possibility. If every applicant knew exactly how much of the outcome was shaped by circumstances outside their control, many would never submit an application at all.

Hope is part of what keeps academic labour moving. But so is uncertainty.

For many scholars, the job search becomes an exercise in interpreting information that is incomplete. You can refine your materials, strengthen your research profile, and prepare carefully for every stage of the process, while still knowing that factors beyond your control may shape the outcome.

Perhaps that is why rejection can feel so complicated. It is not only the disappointment of not getting the job; it is the uncertainty of not knowing what the rejection actually means. Was another candidate a better fit? Did they have experience or connections that aligned more closely with the department’s needs? Was the search shaped by priorities that were never visible to applicants?

Often, there is no way to know.

The hidden reality of academic hiring is not that every search is predetermined or that applications are meaningless. Rather, it is that the process is shaped by more than merit alone. Timing, networks, institutional priorities, reputation, and opportunity all play a role.

Recognizing that does not mean abandoning the pursuit. It means understanding the system more honestly—and remembering that the outcome of a search is never the full measure of your ability or potential.

Then my first flight was delayed.

By the time I landed in Vienna, my connecting flight had already departed. I had missed it by ten minutes—the kind of narrow margin that feels both insignificant and entirely consequential. Ten minutes turned a ninety-minute layover into a fourteen-hour wait for a flight that would last only an hour and a half.

The absurdity of it was hard to ignore. I had travelled halfway across the world, survived an overnight flight on very little sleep, and was now sitting in an airport waiting nearly ten times longer than the actual flight that remained. (I think, anyway—please don't ask me to check my math when I'm running on three hours of sleep!)

A few years ago, this would have sent me into a familiar stress cycle. I would have been angry and annoyed, especially knowing that two other flights headed to destinations close to my final stop—one departing five minutes after mine and another ten minutes after—had waited for their delayed passengers to make their connections, while mine had not. I would have replayed the sequence of events in my mind, fixating on the unfairness of missing my flight by only ten minutes and wondering why things had unfolded that way. I would have entered full complaint mode, venting about the situation to anyone who would listen, while simultaneously trying to rework my plans and salvage the day by figuring out how to make use of the unexpected hours ahead. Rather than accepting that my plans had changed, I would have been focused on everything that had gone wrong and how to regain control over the time I had lost.

Instead, after the initial disappointment wore off, I noticed something that surprised me. I wasn’t spiralling. I wasn’t stressed. I wasn’t ruminating on all the things that had gone wrong or replaying the alternate versions of the day in my head—the flights I could have taken, the timing that could have worked, the decisions that might have changed the outcome. Once it became clear there was nothing I could do to change the situation, I stopped trying to solve it and started thinking instead about how I wanted to spend the next fourteen hours.

I video chatted with family members I had been trying to catch up with for weeks, as we had fallen into a familiar cycle of missed calls, delayed replies, and trying to find a time when our schedules finally aligned. I treated myself to a decaf cappuccino topped with whipped cream and cocoa—a small indulgence that somehow felt fitting for a day that had abandoned its original itinerary. I caught up on a few television shows I had been saving for “when I have time,” and spent part of the afternoon working on a language I have been (slowly) learning. None of these activities were particularly remarkable, but together they transformed the layover from something I simply had to endure into something that felt unexpectedly restorative. (Okay, “restorative” might be doing a lot of heavy lifting here—no one has ever booked a fourteen-hour airport layover as a wellness experience. Still, it gave me a pause I didn’t know I needed.)

The longer I sat in the airport, the more I realized the missed connection wasn’t actually the most interesting part of the story. The interesting part was that I had responded so differently than I once would have.

For much of my academic life, I approached unexpected setbacks as problems that needed to be solved immediately. A rejected article wasn’t simply part of the publication process; it felt like evidence that I had somehow fallen short. A delayed project became a source of anxiety rather than an invitation to reconsider the timeline. A gap in productivity felt like something that needed to be justified. Even relatively minor disruptions could carry an emotional weight far beyond the event itself because I had become accustomed to measuring myself against carefully constructed plans.

That same instinct surfaced during my layover. Part of me immediately began thinking about everything I could accomplish with fourteen uninterrupted hours. I could accomplish a full 8-hour day and still have six hours to spare!

Academia has a way of turning unstructured time into something that feels too valuable to waste. An unexpected delay can quickly become an unexpected writing day: an opportunity to answer emails, revise a manuscript, organize research notes, or finally make progress on the project that has been sitting untouched for weeks. Even inconvenience can become something to optimize.

For a moment, I considered opening my laptop. The impulse was familiar. If I couldn’t control the delayed flight, perhaps I could at least make the time productive.

But I also recognized what was happening. I had spent years in an environment where time was constantly measured by what it produced. Publications, conference presentations, grant applications, teaching evaluations, job materials—the academic calendar trains us to see every available hour as a potential site of achievement. Rest is often treated as something we earn after the work is done, even though the work is never truly finished.

One of the unexpected benefits of taking a step back from academia has been discovering practices that have fundamentally changed how I respond to moments like these. Meditation and grounding exercises haven’t eliminated stress from my life, nor have they transformed me into someone who never feels frustrated when plans fall apart. What they have done is create a little more space between an event and my reaction to it.

Instead of immediately asking, How do I fix this? I find myself asking, What is actually within my control? and How do I want to feel through this moment?

Missing a flight is inconvenient at best, particularly after travelling overnight on three hours of sleep. But the inconvenience itself was only part of what had the potential to make the day miserable. The rest came from the stories I could have attached to it: that the day was wasted, that everything had gone wrong, that I was losing valuable time, that I had made a poor decision by booking my flight the way I had. Grounding has helped me notice how quickly my mind reaches for those narratives and reminded me that I don’t have to follow them.

As I moved between conversations with family, language lessons, leisurely sips of cappuccino, and episodes of television that I never seem to make time for at home, I found myself thinking about how little space academia leaves for this kind of flexibility. Academic life asks us to plan carefully because so much of it depends on uncertainty. We map publication timelines, schedule conferences months in advance, structure semesters around teaching responsibilities, and organize our careers around deadlines that often arrive before the previous task has even finished.

Planning is necessary. But somewhere along the way, many of us also learn to believe that every unexpected interruption must either be overcome or transformed into something useful.

The irony is that academic careers are built around things we cannot control. Articles are rejected. Funding applications are unsuccessful. Job searches take unexpected turns. Projects evolve into something different than what we originally imagined. We spend years navigating uncertainty—sometimes literally uprooting our lives to move across the country for a one-year position—yet we often respond by trying to tighten our grip on the one thing that feels measurable: our time.

Perhaps that is why the temptation to optimize my layover felt so familiar. Fourteen uninterrupted hours seemed almost too valuable to waste. Surely I should leave the airport having accomplished something I could point to—especially since I wasn’t actually leaving the airport to check out Vienna.

Instead, I left having accomplished very little in the conventional sense. (Although, in a slightly ironic twist, I did open my laptop and write this blog post. Clearly, if Facebook had a relationship status for my productivity habits, it would say: “It’s complicated.”)

I am still learning how to resist the instinct to measure every day by what it produces. Academia leaves deep habits, and they do not disappear simply because we step away from the institution. I still feel the impulse to optimize spare hours, to justify rest by making it serve some future productivity, and to transform every interruption into an opportunity. Some days, that voice is louder than others.

But sitting in an airport for fourteen unexpected hours reminded me that another way of moving through the world is possible. Sometimes resilience is not about recovering lost productivity or finding a silver lining that makes the setback worthwhile. Sometimes it is simply about accepting that the itinerary has changed, allowing yourself to be where you are, and trusting that not every unexpected pause needs to become another achievement.

I missed a flight connection that day. But I also found time to reconnect—with family, with a slower pace, and with a version of myself that no longer believes every moment has to be accounted for.

Perhaps those were the connections I needed after all.

A little too on-the-nose? Maybe. But when the airport hands you a missed connection, apparently you take the metaphor and write the blog post.

My immediate response was not frustration so much as calculation. I mentally worked through the battery life on my devices, wondered whether I could tether my laptop to my phone, and found myself worrying—far more than I would like to admit—about missing my self-imposed deadline for this week's Substack essay. I had convinced myself that publishing every week was an important discipline, and perhaps it is. But in that moment I also realized how easily one set of productivity metrics had been replaced by another. The institution had changed, yet the impulse to measure the value of my week by what I had produced remained remarkably intact. It was only later, once it became obvious that none of those plans were particularly realistic, that I realized how instinctive those calculations had become. Faced with an interruption, my first impulse was not to accept it but to find a way of restoring productivity as quickly as possible.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about what it means to step away from academia. For many people, that phrase carries an assumption that one has also stepped away from intellectual life, as though scholarship exists only within universities and curiosity only flourishes when it is attached to institutions. My own experience has been almost the opposite. Stepping away has not diminished my desire to think or write. If anything, it has made me realize how difficult it is to disentangle those impulses from the systems that taught me how they ought to be expressed.

Academic work has a curious way of organizing time. There is always another article to revise, another grant application to prepare, another conference abstract whose deadline is approaching just quickly enough to occupy the back of your mind. The work is never entirely finished, and neither, it often seems, are we. Over time, it becomes easy to see every spare hour as an opportunity to move a project forward, every conversation as the beginning of an idea, every book as something that ought eventually to become a citation. Even rest acquires a kind of instrumental logic, valued less for its own sake than for its ability to make us productive again tomorrow.

What surprised me most about the outage was not that I could no longer work, but how uncomfortable I became once it was clear that I couldn't work around it. There was no internet to search for articles, no reliable battery life to continue writing, and no guarantee that relocating to a café or library would solve the problem. Plus, given that I was at my dad’s place in the country, it would have taken me at least half an hour to get somewhere besides a Tim Hortons.

And yet, after the initial frustration subsided, something else emerged in its place.

I found myself sitting inside listening to an audiobook I’ve been thinking about for days. I played with my cat, and then cuddled him for a solid half hour. I sat and talked with my brother—something we often don’t find the time to do. We went for a walk with the dog and I left my phone at home. It was annoying not to have power, but it was also a bit freeing.

The experience made me wonder how often our relationship to time is shaped less by deliberate choice than by the systems within which we move. We tend to think of productivity as a personal virtue, something that reflects discipline or ambition, but it is also a way of inhabiting the world that is continually reinforced by the institutions around us. Universities reward it. Workplaces reward it. Increasingly, our digital lives reward it too. Even projects that begin as acts of genuine curiosity can quietly become governed by metrics of consistency, visibility, and output.

Perhaps that is why I found myself worrying about a missed Substack deadline while sitting in a powerless house during a heat wave. The irony was difficult to ignore. I had spent months reflecting on the expectations of academic productivity, only to discover how readily I had imported some of those same expectations into a project that was supposed to offer something different. What had begun as a space for thinking in public had, almost without my noticing, acquired its own timelines and obligations.

This is not an argument against discipline. Writing regularly matters, just as showing up consistently for any meaningful practice matters. Nor is it an argument against academia, which continues to produce extraordinary scholarship and remains home to many of the thinkers whose work has shaped my own. Rather, it is an argument for paying closer attention to the assumptions we carry with us, especially the ones that persist long after we have left the institutions that first cultivated them.

The power eventually returned. The fan began spinning again, the Wi-Fi reconnected, and the emails that had quietly accumulated throughout the afternoon appeared all at once. By the next morning, everything had resumed exactly where it had left off.

What has lingered is not the inconvenience of the outage but the question it left behind. If losing power for a few hours was enough to reveal how quickly I equate an interrupted day with a lost one, then perhaps the interruption was exposing something much larger than a temporary inconvenience. Perhaps stepping away from academia is not simply about leaving one institution for another kind of work. Perhaps it is about learning to inhabit time differently, allowing curiosity to exist without immediately asking what it will produce, and remembering that an intellectual life is not measured only by the things we can point to at the end of the week.

this presentation wasn’t written by Claude?” and, after an awkward pause, the presenter admitted it was. Or something like that.

What particularly struck me about this exchange (as told on Bluesky, anyway) was first, that I was not surprised by this at all, and second, that the presenter claimed AI made him feel “useless” because it is so good at writing.

But…is it?

Anyone who has taught an undergraduate course since ChatGPT became mainstream can tell you, without a doubt, that AI is not “so good” at writing. In fact, it’s not good at all. Sure, AI agents can synthesize information, produce decent summaries, and even rewrite content in ways that can be more engaging.

But AI cannot produce depth.

I can’t tell you how many assignments I’ve graded over the past three years that have been extremely well written in terms of sentence structure and grammar, and extremely poorly written in terms of communicating anything of depth or value. Everything is overly exaggerated. Everything is written in sets of threes. Everything is repetitive. And everything points to some vague bigger picture without ever giving any specifics.

In one of my classes last year, I finally broke down. I begged my students to stop using AI to write their assignments because they were so unbelievably boring and lacklustre. It’s mind numbing to read iterations of the same assignment over and over. The worst part was my assignments had elements the students had no choice but to do themselves, but when it came to writing they passed the ball to AI. And AI made an extremely show-y dunk that somehow managed to miss the basket.

Bad basketball metaphors aside, that break down in my class actually taught me some important things about why people are using AI at increasing rates. Sure, we’re all overworked, tired, stressed out about everything happening in the world. But the current undergraduate students are also incredibly afraid of failure.

Elementary and secondary schools in Ontario have been forced to cede significant ground over the last decade when it comes to preparing students for the so-called real world. I remember when I was in high school in the 2000s that teachers were no longer allowed to prevent students from handing in assignments late—students could even submit everything on the last day of the term and still have their work graded.

In the primary grades, students can no longer be held back a year even if they may developmentally need it. Instead, they’re pushed along with their peers and often end up falling further and further behind. And don’t even get me started on parents who harass teachers into giving their kids higher grades.

We have created an education ecosystem in which failure is no longer a possibility. Students get pushed along no matter what, and they no longer have opportunities to fail. They are no longer held to account for deadlines or time management. And they are no longer learning to respect the teachers and instructors before them.

I’ll get in to more specifics of these areas in later posts, but for now I want to focus on what this conversation with my undergrad students showed me. First, the majority of students responded by saying they didn’t want to use AI, but had never failed before coming to university and now were incredibly afraid of doing so. The stakes were so high. They could lose scholarships, lose their place in co-op, or just experience their first failing grade (which is huge in and of itself). They didn’t feel they had the space within the university system to make mistakes.

Yet mistakes—and failure—are how we learn. They’re how we grow and iterate on our ideas and develop into people with more depth and character. We are supposed to fail. And we are supposed to have built the resiliency to get back up and try again when that happens.

The keynote presenter at the DH conference was certainly not of the generation I’m speaking about and that I typically teach. But his outlook—that AI makes him useless—strikes me as exactly what we’re setting our students and kids up for if we don’t intervene.

AI is not inevitable, no matter what the tech bros say. We can and should continue to think critically and think for ourselves. We can and should write, and write poorly so that we can learn to write better. We should fail, and we should rejoice in having the ability and privilege to do so.

I’ll leave you here with one of my all-time favourite quotes from Samuel Beckett:

Ever try. Ever fail. No matter.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Not too seriously sick. Just the kind of sick that leaves you in an unpleasant middle ground: too exhausted to do much of anything, but not exhausted enough to completely let go of the feeling that you should be doing something.

So I've spent most of the week at home, moving between the couch, the kettle, and whatever streaming service or audiobook seemed capable of holding my attention.

I've also spent a surprising amount of time thinking about work.

Every morning I would wake up feeling slightly better and immediately start doing mental calculations. Maybe I could answer a few emails. Maybe I could read that article I'd been putting off. Maybe I could finally make progress on one of the projects that's been lingering at the edge of my attention for months.

Then I'd spend the morning trying to work, discover that my brain had the processing power of an aging laptop with twenty tabs open, and return to the couch where I would sleep away most of the afternoon.

The thing that interested me wasn't that I couldn't work. I was sick. That was hardly surprising. What interested me was how disappointed I felt.

Disappointed in what, exactly?

The purpose of staying home sick is, presumably, to recover. And yet some part of me seemed convinced that recovery should come with measurable outputs. If I wasn't getting work done, maybe I could at least reorganize my notes. Read a book. Clear out my inbox. Figure out some new system for managing my time.

Academia has a funny way of teaching you that every moment contains unrealized potential. There is always another article to read, another application to submit, another skill to develop. The work is never truly finished, which means productivity can start to feel less like a means to an end and more like a way of evaluating yourself.

You are either making progress or you are falling behind.

At least that's how it can feel.

One of the stranger things about burnout is that it doesn't necessarily disappear when the conditions that produced it disappear. Sometimes it sticks around as a habit of mind. A reflex. A tendency to interpret every free afternoon as an opportunity that ought to be used wisely.

I've been thinking about burnout a lot over the last two years, and I thought I had gotten reasonably good at recognizing those patterns when they appeared. What surprised me this week was how quickly being sick brought them back to the surface.

Lying on the couch, exhausted, I found myself worrying less about getting better than about all the things I wasn't accomplishing. It was irrational, but it also felt familiar.

I think part of the appeal of productivity is that it creates the feeling of control. If I can answer emails, I'm still on top of things. If I can finish a task, the day hasn't been wasted. If I can make progress, then at least something useful has come from my day.

Recovery offers no such reassurance. Recovery is mostly waiting. Sleeping. Drinking tea. Taking meds and eating soup. Trusting that your body knows how to do something you can't really speed up through effort.

For people who are used to solving problems by working harder, this can be surprisingly difficult.

So this week I've been trying, not always successfully, to resist the urge to turn recovery into another project. No optimization. No productivity challenge disguised as self-care. Just rest.

Maybe a week spent getting better doesn't need to produce anything else.

Maybe getting better is enough.

This feels increasingly important to admit because academia is very good at cultivating intellectual sophistication while quietly neglecting emotional, practical, and existential forms of development. You can become extraordinarily skilled at interpreting culture while remaining deeply disconnected from your own body, relationships, limits, and desires.

In some ways, graduate school intensifies this disconnection structurally. Your life becomes organized around work that is never fully complete. There is always another book or article to read, another paper to revise, another theoretical framework you should probably understand better. Intellectual labour has no natural stopping point, which means productivity expands infinitely if you let it. And if you are already someone who derives self-worth from achievement, academia can become psychologically consuming very quickly—especially because overwork is often interpreted as seriousness.

The ideal academic is imagined as someone fully devoted to thought. Someone willing to sacrifice stability, money, leisure, even health for intellectual life. Exhaustion becomes evidence of commitment. Burnout becomes normalized to the point of invisibility. I adapted to this environment frighteningly well—not because it was healthy for me, but because my nervous system already understood overfunctioning as normal. I could work constantly. I could suppress physical needs. I could organize my entire identity around output.

For a long time, this felt meaningful. There is genuine pleasure in intellectual immersion. Genuine intimacy in conversations where people care deeply about ideas. Genuine satisfaction in discovering language for experiences that once felt impossible to articulate. I do not want to flatten academia into pure critique because those parts mattered to me profoundly. But I also think institutions can provide meaning while simultaneously extracting too much from the people most emotionally invested in them.

Graduate school gave me intellectual frameworks for understanding power, ideology, gender, capitalism, affect, identity, and representation. What it did not give me was work-life balance, financial stability, emotional regulation, rest, or a functional relationship to my own limits. In fact, many academic environments quietly (or not-so-quietly) discourage those things.

There is always an implicit sense that truly dedicated scholars should be willing to give more. More time. More energy. More availability. More sacrifice. Because the job market is so precarious, many graduate students internalize the belief that survival depends on permanent self-optimization. Publish more. Network more. Teach more. Accomplish more. Or, as the old refrain goes, publish or perish.

It’s intentionally dramatic, and intentionally focused on the individual rather than the systemic issues.

Meanwhile, entire areas of ordinary adulthood remain underdeveloped because academic life often delays or destabilizes them structurally. People postpone financial planning because stipends are inadequate, which leaves those with advanced degrees milestones behind their peers in terms of savings and investments. They postpone healthcare because workloads are overwhelming, postpone relationships because mobility and precarity make stability difficult, and postpone rest because there is always more work waiting.

Eventually, many people realize they have built highly intellectualized lives that are emotionally, physically, and financially unsustainable to inhabit long-term.

I think this realization can feel especially destabilizing because academia encourages over-identification with intellectual identity. Being “smart” stops being something you do and becomes who you are. So when academic structures fail to provide stability or recognition, the disappointment feels existential rather than merely professional. You do not just lose career certainty. You lose a version of yourself organized around intellectual exceptionalism.

I still instinctively measure my worth through productivity. I still feel guilty resting. I still catch myself treating life like an assignment I might eventually complete correctly if I optimize hard enough.

But increasingly, I think adulthood requires skills academia rarely teaches:

How to experience pleasure without earning it. How to maintain relationships not organized around achievement. How to tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into self-surveillance. How to build routines that support your body rather than extract from it. How to exist as a person instead of a project.

These are not anti-intellectual questions. If anything, they feel increasingly central to survival because eventually you realize being able to analyze the world brilliantly does not automatically teach you how to live inside it gently.

When you grow up in instability, people tend to romanticize resilience afterward. They talk about how ‘driven’ you were, how ‘mature’ you seemed for your age, and how impressive it was that you kept getting straight A’s while everything else was happening. My parents, years later, continuously say I was the child they never had to worry about. And that’s because I made myself into someone without needs—someone living solely self-sufficiently, who constantly provided for others.

School was the first place where the rules made sense to me. You studied, you performed well, you received praise. There were rubrics. Expectations. Outcomes. Unlike family systems, unlike emotionally volatile homes, unlike relationships where affection could disappear unpredictably, school offered something intoxicating: consistency.

I also understood very early that intelligence could function as a kind of social currency. Teachers treated me differently when I excelled. Adults described me as promising. My parents bragged about how smart I was. I got attention—something I was sorely lacking—when I was succeeding academically.

Later on, academics became something more than just attention and identity to me. The internet often talks about “gifted kid burnout” in ways that flatten the emotional complexity underneath it. It becomes aestheticized: colour-coded planners, perfectionism memes, former AP students making TikToks about crying over deadlines. But for many people, especially girls raised in instability, academic excellence was never just about ambition. It was survival infrastructure.

Guidance counsellors talked about scholarships and futures and potential in voices that suggested escape was possible. So, I built a self around achievement because achievement seemed safer than need. Getting the highest grades in high school did not simply make me proud. It made me feel temporarily protected. Full-ride scholarships did not just represent accomplishment. They represented mobility. Distance. The possibility of leaving.

And when your entire emotional architecture is built around proving your value, rest begins to feel dangerous or unsafe. I still struggle with this now.

There is a particular kind of anxiety that emerges when your worth has always been tied to performance. Unproductivity feels morally wrong and stillness feels like discomfort. Every Even joy becomes difficult to access unless it can be transformed into something measurable.

I sometimes wonder who I might have become if I had learned, earlier, that love and safety were not things you had to academically earn—and not things you should have to earn at all.

Academia, of course, only intensified all of this.

Universities reward people who over-function. Graduate school especially rewards self-abandonment disguised as passion. You work impossible hours because the work matters. You sacrifice your body because everyone else is sacrificing theirs, too. You internalize precarity as personal failure. And if you are already psychologically predisposed to equate exhaustion with virtue, academia can feel less like a workplace and more like an emotional ecosystem specifically designed to exploit your coping mechanisms.

For a long time, I thought this was simply what being serious looked like. Now I think many institutions survive because they attract people who are desperate to prove they deserve to exist inside them. Desperate to earn a place among the ranks.

The hardest realization, for me, has been understanding that achievement did not actually create the emotional safety I thought it would. You can get the scholarships, the degrees, the publications, the praise, and still carry the same dysregulated nervous system underneath all of it.

I don’t regret becoming someone who cares deeply about learning. I don’t regret intellectual ambition. But I do grieve how early I learned to confuse being impressive with being safe. Sometimes I think my entire personality was constructed around making sure nobody would ever be able to dismiss me. The problem is that, eventually, you become exhausted from constantly auditioning for your own humanity.

In Ontario, the dominant narrative is that post-secondary institutions are experiencing a sudden or external funding crisis—something unfortunate, almost accidental. But the more accurate framing is that this is the predictable outcome of long-term policy choices: tuition freezes, per-student funding decline, and increasing structural reliance on volatile revenue streams like international enrolment.

Multiple reports have described a chronic per-student funding gap, with Ontario consistently ranking among the lowest provinces in Canada for post-secondary operating support. At the same time, the sector has become increasingly dependent on tuition revenue—especially international students—as a structural stabilizer rather than a supplement. When that pipeline tightens, as it has in recent policy shifts and enrolment changes, the system does not gently adjust. It contracts sharply.

In 2025, reporting from Global News highlighted how Ontario colleges faced significant financial strain tied to declines in international enrolment, contributing to layoffs, campus restructuring, and program closures. One union estimate further suggests that nearly 10,000 college faculty and staff positions may be affected across the province as institutions respond to these pressures.

From an industry perspective, none of this is surprising. If a large organization becomes structurally dependent on a high-margin but unstable revenue stream, and that stream weakens, cost-cutting follows quickly. Labour is usually the first adjustment lever. Programs are consolidated. Work is redistributed. Efficiency becomes the governing language. What is different in academia is not the mechanism—it is the framing.

The same restructuring that would be described in corporate terms as workforce optimization or portfolio rationalization is often described in universities as a regrettable but externally imposed crisis. The implication is that institutions are passive recipients of economic conditions rather than active participants in designing those conditions over time. That framing matters because it obscures how normalized underfunding has actually become as a governance strategy.

Once you accept that baseline constraint, internal decisions start to make more sense. Heavy reliance on contingent labour. Expansion of administrative systems for compliance, reporting, enrolment management, and branding. Constant pressure on departments to justify themselves in terms of “demand,” “impact,” or labour-market alignment. Increased recruitment dependence on international tuition markets.

This is not a deviation from the system. It is the system adapting to scarcity.

Where underfunding actually shows up: teaching labour

This is where policy becomes critical because “underfunding” is not just a fiscal condition—it is a labour design problem.

A familiar structure in large Ontario university courses involves teaching assistants or sessional lecturers grading 150–200 papers per cycle, often with an implied expectation of roughly 10-15 minutes per response. On paper, this is framed as scalable pedagogy. In practice, it produces a structural mismatch between student labour and instructor capacity.

A student may spend days or even weeks reading, thinking, drafting, and revising a single paper. That work is cognitively intensive and often personally invested, particularly in humanities and social science courses where reflection is part of the assignment itself. The instructor or teaching assistant is then required to compress that labour into a few minutes of evaluation—not because instructors are disengaged, but because the funding model does not allocate sufficient paid time for anything else. At scale, the only viable adaptation is reduced attention.

So, people adapt. They scan instead of reading closely. They rely more heavily on rubrics. They prioritize throughput over engagement. They make grading decisions faster than the work itself can comfortably support. Over time, care becomes structurally incompatible with workload.

This is not a moral issue on the part of TAs or instructors. It is a funding issue expressed as time, and that time pressure is not accidental. It is produced by a system in which funding has not kept pace with enrolment growth, inflation, or labour demand.

Doug Ford’s government and the restructuring of post-secondary funding

It is impossible to separate today’s conditions from policy decisions made under Doug Ford.

In 2019, the Ford government implemented a 10% domestic tuition cut followed by a tuition freeze. CBC News reported that universities immediately warned this would reduce operating revenue without equivalent increases in provincial grants, creating structural budget pressure across the sector. More recently, in 2026, CBC News reported that the Ford government ended the tuition freeze and allowed annual tuition increases of up to 2%, while also restructuring OSAP to reduce non-repayable grants and increase reliance on loans. The Globe and Mail has similarly reported that Ontario’s post-secondary reforms represent a structural shift in funding: less reliance on stable public operating grants and more reliance on tuition flexibility and student financing mechanisms to stabilize institutional budgets.

These changes are often framed by government as “sustainability” measures. Institutions, in turn, frame them as necessary adaptation. Students and instructors experience them as workload compression, increased debt exposure, and reduced instructional time. All of these perspectives matter; they just occupy different positions in the system.

What Ontario policy has actually done is tighten the system’s time economy

The Ford government’s recent OSAP restructuring and tuition policy shifts do not function as isolated interventions. They function as a redistribution of financial responsibility across the system.

CBC News has emphasized that the shift toward loans over grants increases long-term student debt exposure while allowing the province to present OSAP as modernized and fiscally sustainable. At the same time, universities remain constrained by a mix of partially frozen domestic tuition structures, volatile international enrolment revenue, and stagnant per-student operating funding.

The result is predictable: larger class sizes, heavier reliance on contract teaching labour, reduced feedback time, and increased administrative mediation between teaching and delivery. The system does not collapse; it compresses.

The gap between language and material reality

Universities continue to describe themselves in the language of mentorship, intellectual development, and individualized learning. News coverage of provincial government announcements often reproduces institutional framing emphasizing accessibility, opportunity, and student success, even as reporting simultaneously documents funding strain and labour pressure. But the labour conditions required to sustain those claims at scale are increasingly misaligned with available funding and time.

That gap is where most of the strain sits.

Students experience it as reduced feedback. Teaching assistants and instructors experience it as compressed grading time and fragmented attention. Institutions experience it as structural financial pressure.

But structurally, it is the same phenomenon: a system operating under sustained constraint while maintaining a language of abundance.

Naming the system clearly

None of this means universities are failing. In fact, they are functioning exactly as designed under current fiscal and policy conditions. Much like he’s done with the healthcare system, Ford’s policy decisions are designed to reduce and then break down the model of publicly-assisted post-secondary education in Ontario. He is in favour of privatization, and he is signing the death sentence for publicly funded education.

Doug Ford’s government is not the only actor shaping this system, but it is a central one. Its policies on tuition, OSAP, and post-secondary funding have been consistently documented by CBC News, The Globe and Mail, and other major Canadian labour reporting outlets as part of a broader restructuring of Ontario’s post-secondary funding model.

The key issue is not simply that universities are underfunded. It is that underfunding has become a stable policy condition—and is still often narrated as if it were an external disruption rather than a governed outcome. From where I stand, that gap between policy and public narrative is critical.

Because once you see underfunding as structured rather than accidental, the system becomes legible for what it is: not collapsing, not confused, but operating within constraints that have been steadily built over time.

The only question left, then, is this: how much longer will post-secondary education survive under Doug Ford’s government?

Not real grief, at least. Not the kind you can name without immediately qualifying it. I thought it would feel like relief, or clarity, or forward motion. Something clean and legible, like turning a page. And, in some ways, it did. But it also felt like waking up inside a life that no longer had a single stable storyline attached to it.

Nothing external had to fully end for that feeling to arrive. There was no dramatic rupture, no single moment of exit, no official closing ceremony. Just a slow, accumulating realization that the future I had been organizing my entire life around was no longer available in the way I had imagined it.

Academia is not just a career path, it’s a temporal structure. It organizes your relationship to time itself. Graduate school teaches you to live in deferral. You learn to say: after the coursework, after the exams, after the dissertation, after the publication, after the job market, after tenure. Your life is always slightly ahead of you, always just beyond reach, but never quite arriving. And for a long time, that structure felt almost comforting. It turned instability into a narrative of becoming. If I am struggling now, it is because I am not there yet. There always was a “there.”

What I did not fully understand at the time is how much emotional infrastructure I was building on that imagined arrival. Not just professional identity, but psychological stability. Because when your sense of self becomes organized around a future institutional role, you are not only pursuing a job. You are pursuing coherence. A version of yourself that finally makes sense. A version that has been recognized, stabilized, and quietly sanctioned by an institution large enough to feel like it can hold you. A professor. A scholar. A permanent academic self.

When that future begins to dissolve—slowly, then all at once—it is not just a career transition. It is a destabilization of identity.

I think people outside academia sometimes underestimate how emotionally total the system can feel from the inside. You are not only working within it. You are being shaped by it. Your friendships are often academic, your intellectual identity is academic, your sense of value is mediated through academic evaluation, and your future is imagined in academic terms. Even your suffering becomes legible through academic language: burnout, precarity, productivity, performance, output.

So when you leave, it is not simply that you are changing jobs. It is that you are stepping out of an entire symbolic universe that had been organizing your life for years. And no one really prepares you for what happens when that structure disappears.

There is a particular kind of silence that follows. Not external silence, necessarily, but internal. A loss of narrative momentum. You wake up and realize your days are no longer automatically oriented toward an external milestone that will eventually justify everything you are currently enduring. There is no dissertation shaping your horizon, no publication timeline quietly structuring your anxiety, no institutional ladder that makes your exhaustion feel temporarily meaningful. Just you, in a more open-ended present than you are used to.

And open-endedness, I have learned, can feel a lot like disorientation before it feels like freedom.

There is a strange cognitive dissonance in realizing that something can be both deeply meaningful and structurally unsustainable at the same time.

I still miss parts of it. The intensity of thought. The feeling of being immersed in ideas with other people who cared about them in the same way. The rare moments of intellectual recognition that felt almost like being seen at a deeper level than ordinary social interaction allows. Those moments are real, and I do not want to flatten them into critique.

But I also cannot ignore what they were nested inside: chronic overwork, economic instability, emotional depletion normalized as dedication, and a job market that increasingly treats even highly qualified people as disposable. Perhaps most importantly, a system that relies on the very people most emotionally invested in it to sustain its most fragile labour.

Graduate students, adjuncts, early-career researchers. The people who keep the intellectual world functioning while often being the least secure within it.

When I think about grief in this context, I think it is partly grief for a structure that made suffering feel legible, even when it was harmful. At least it had meaning. At least it was heading somewhere.

Leaving academia interrupts that kind of meaning-making. It removes the shared language that once made your experience immediately interpretable. Your work no longer maps onto a widely recognized hierarchy of legitimacy. You are no longer “on the way to becoming” something institutionally sanctioned.

You are just here.

And “here” takes time to learn how to inhabit.

I think part of what I am grieving is not just the institution itself, but the version of me it offered me. Even if that future was conditional, even if it was unevenly distributed, even if it was increasingly inaccessible for most people, it still gave shape to a person I was intent on becoming.

But there is something else I am also beginning to notice, slowly and imperfectly: a different kind of attention becoming possible outside that structure. One that is less oriented toward evaluation and more toward presence. Less about becoming someone recognizable within a system, more about understanding what it actually feels like to live a life that is not constantly being measured against one.

This is not a resolution. I do not think grief of this kind resolves cleanly. It rearranges itself. Some days it still feels like loss. Other days it feels like relief. Most days it feels like both at once, occupying the same space without resolving into either.

What I am slowly learning is that leaving academia is not only an ending, it is also a loss of a particular way of imagining the future and your future self. And that kind of loss shows up quietly—in the absence of deadlines that once structured your sense of self, in the unfamiliarity of unmeasured time, in the strange realization that your life is no longer waiting to begin.

It is already happening. And you are still learning how to be inside it.

Universities consistently describe academic labour through the language of vocation, passion, intellectual community, and public good. Teaching is framed as transforming the next generation, research is framed as socially meaningful advances. Professors are encouraged to imagine themselves as contributing not simply to an industry, but to knowledge itself—to critical thought, democracy, culture, and collective intellectual life. Academia presents itself as a kind of higher calling, something morally and intellectually distinct from the corporate world.

And I think many people genuinely believe this when they enter the profession. I know I did.

Part of what initially drew me toward academia was precisely the idea that universities represented one of the few remaining spaces where intellectual life could exist somewhat outside the logic of pure profit. The university was supposed to be a place where difficult ideas mattered, where critical thinking was valued, where education existed for more than economic efficiency alone.

But the longer I remain within academia, the more difficult it becomes to ignore the extent to which universities increasingly operate exactly like businesses.

Students are treated as consumers and come to treat professors as if they are working directly for the students. Administrators speak constantly about branding, growth, productivity, efficiency, and marketability. Departments are evaluated according to enrolment numbers, grant income, and measurable outputs. Programs perceived as insufficiently profitable become vulnerable to cuts regardless of intellectual or cultural value. Meanwhile, upper administration expands continuously while precarious labour becomes normalized across teaching and research.

And yet, despite functioning increasingly through corporate logics, universities continue relying heavily upon the language of higher purpose.

I think this contradiction is important because the narrative of academia as a vocation often functions to justify labour conditions that would likely be considered unacceptable elsewhere.

You are expected to work excessive hours because the work is meaningful. You are expected to accept instability because intellectual life is supposedly a privilege. You are expected to tolerate burnout, precarity, low pay, geographic instability, and continual professional rejection because academia is framed not simply as employment, but as passion, as calling, as purpose.

The profession depends heavily upon emotional and moral attachment precisely because that attachment makes exploitation easier to sustain. After all, people will tolerate conditions for a “higher calling” that they would never accept from an ordinary employer.

Academic culture consistently romanticizes sacrifice. The ideal academic worker is imagined as someone willing to subordinate nearly every aspect of personal life—financial stability, health, relationships, geographic rootedness—to the demands of the profession.

What makes this especially effective is that the work itself often does genuinely matter to people. Many academics care deeply about teaching, research, writing, and intellectual life. The problem is not that these commitments are fake. The problem is that institutions increasingly weaponize those commitments in order to extract more labour under increasingly unstable conditions.

I think this is why so many academics struggle to recognize exploitation while it is happening. The language of passion obscures the material realities of work itself. If you are told repeatedly that your labour is a privilege, it becomes easier to normalize conditions that are emotionally and financially unsustainable.

And this dynamic becomes especially visible in precarious academic labour. Contract instructors are often paid poorly, denied long-term stability, overloaded with teaching, and excluded from institutional decision-making while simultaneously being told that teaching itself is meaningful and important work. Graduate students perform enormous amounts of teaching and administrative labour while existing in highly unstable financial conditions because the profession continually frames this exploitation as apprenticeship or training rather than labour extraction.

Even the language universities use reveals this contradiction. Academia loves to talk about ‘community’ and ‘well-being’ while functioning increasingly through disposability. It celebrates intellectual freedom while relying heavily upon precarious workers who cannot safely challenge institutional structures without risking future employment. The university continues presenting itself as morally distinct from corporate culture while increasingly reproducing many of the same labour practices associated with it.

And this exploitation is not just perpetuated by administrators. It’s perpetuated by department chairs, advisors, mentors—the very people you think have your best interests at heart. I recently learned that someone I considered a mentor, whom I have long admired and respected, was committed to treating students and those on the job market the same way they had been treated—i.e., poorly. The rationale was something along the lines of, “Well, I had to do and struggle with XYZ, so you should, too”.

Perhaps what unsettles me most is not simply that universities operate like businesses. Universities have always been entangled with economics, prestige, and institutional power. What troubles me is the gap between the ideals academia and, more importantly to me, individual academics continues to publicly perform and the material realities many people working within universities actually experience. The inequities in academia are a systemic problem. But they are also a problem being perpetuated by the very people who know exactly what it’s like to be exploited in these ways. Even naming the problem as ‘academia’ is a way of distancing the real people from the problematic system they are actively choosing to uphold.

The profession still wants people to believe they are participating in something noble. And maybe that belief is necessary for the system to continue functioning at all.

Over the last few years, much of my life was organized around medical appointments, medication schedules, waiting rooms, hospital visits, phone calls, paperwork, and the strange emotional rhythm that develops when someone you love is unwell for a long period of time. Illness changes your relationship to time. Entire days disappear into logistics, plans, symptoms. Even moments of relative calm often feel shaped by anticipation—waiting for the next appointment, the next update, the next problem.

At the same time, academia continues moving. Emails continue arriving. Teaching still requires performance, preparation, and emotional presence. Research still demands concentration and long stretches of uninterrupted thought. The profession quietly assumes a level of stability and personal autonomy that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain while caring for another person.

This isn’t to say there aren’t opportunities for taking breaks. In fact, while caring for another I was encouraged greatly to take a step back from my work. But if you’re already feeling behind—starting a doctoral program after years in the workforce, expecting you may need to spend 7-10 years on the job market—taking a break often doesn’t seem feasible. And if you read my previous post, you know that academic work has often been my solace in trying times.

What I have found particularly difficult is the extent to which academic culture often treats care responsibilities as peripheral to intellectual life rather than deeply intertwined with it. There remains an implicit assumption within academia that serious scholarly work requires a kind of singular devotion to the profession: sustained productivity, constant responsiveness, geographic flexibility, and the ability to prioritize work above nearly everything else. Care work disrupts this model because it necessarily reorganizes one’s priorities around another person’s needs, vulnerabilities, and unpredictability.

And illness is unpredictable.

Some days are manageable. Other days collapse entirely around emergencies, exhaustion, or emotional overwhelm. Long-term caregiving makes it difficult to maintain the illusion of control and consistency that academic professionalism often demands. You cannot always answer emails immediately. You cannot always meet self-imposed productivity goals. Sometimes you are simply too tired to think clearly after spending hours navigating hospitals or trying to comfort someone you love.

What strikes me increasingly is how invisible this labour often remains within academic spaces. Universities may formally acknowledge concepts like wellness, balance, and accommodation, but academic culture itself still tends to reward uninterrupted, solo productivity above all else. There is little room within the structure of the profession for the reality that people exist within networks of dependency and care.

At the same time, caring for someone who is ill changes one’s relationship to academia itself. Many of the anxieties that once felt professionally consuming to me began to shift under the weight of actual illness. The urgency surrounding publication timelines, conference presentations, or academic status began to feel strangely detached from the realities unfolding elsewhere in my life. Spending enough time in hospitals changes one’s sense of proportion. Academia continues treating relatively minor professional matters as existential crises while illness quietly reveals how fragile and contingent everything actually is.

Instead of slowing down, many academics become skilled at compartmentalization. You move between caregiving and professional performance constantly. One moment you are discussing medical results or helping someone through physical pain; the next you are expected to teach, attend meetings, answer student emails, or present yourself professionally as though your emotional and physical energy has not already been consumed elsewhere. Or, as the kids say today, you are expected to function as if you haven’t already spent your 3 spoons for the day.

I think this fragmentation becomes especially difficult because care work itself is emotionally complex in ways academia does not easily recognize. Caring for someone you love can be profoundly meaningful while also exhausting, frightening, isolating, and destabilizing. There is grief involved even before loss itself arrives—the grief of watching someone struggle, the grief of witnessing gradual change, the grief of realizing how little control you actually have over another person’s suffering.

Perhaps this is part of why caregiving can feel so alienating. The profession is organized around ideals of independence, productivity, and intellectual self-sufficiency, whereas care work confronts you constantly with dependency, limitation, vulnerability, and the body itself. And yet, increasingly, I find myself thinking that care work may reveal something important about the failures of academic culture more broadly.

Universities often speak about humanity, ethics, critical thought, and social responsibility, but academic structures themselves frequently leave very little room for the actual realities of human life: illness, aging, grief, dependency, exhaustion, and care, let alone humanity. The profession continues operating as though intellectual life exists separately from these experiences when, in reality, they shape nearly everything about how people move through the world.

The body is not independent from academic thought. Neither are care networks. And perhaps this is just a continuation of the old system in which men professors thought and wrote and researched while their wives took care of the ‘humanity’ of life—the household, the children, and more.

A question I’ve long considered is this: Is the solution to simply integrate care networks into academic life so that academics have support when life inevitably becomes unpredictable? I used to think so, but with increasing evidence that even those I’ve long trusted and admired seek to recreate the inequalities they were subjected to, I’m beginning to change my mind.

Growing up in an unstable household, school became one of the only places that felt structured, predictable, and legible to me. Home was emotionally volatile in ways that made it difficult to fully relax or feel secure, and very early on I began to understand achievement as a way out. If I performed well enough academically, I thought, I could eventually leave. I could build a different kind of life for myself—one organized around stability and independence rather than chaos. And so I became very good at school.

I got the highest grades in high school. I won scholarships. I learned how to work constantly, how to overperform, how to organize my entire sense of self-worth around productivity and achievement. At the time, these behaviours looked healthy from the outside because educational institutions reward precisely these traits: discipline, perfectionism, hyper-independence, relentless work ethic.

What I did not understand then was that many of these behaviours were also trauma responses.

When people talk about complex PTSD, they often focus on emotional symptoms—hypervigilance, anxiety, dissociation, emotional dysregulation—but increasingly I think one of the less discussed aspects of C-PTSD is the way it can produce individuals who become extraordinarily functional within high-pressure systems for long periods of time. Trauma can make people highly adaptive. You become skilled at anticipating expectations, suppressing your own needs, performing competence, and remaining productive under extreme stress because, at some point, those skills were necessary.

Academia rewards this kind of person—or at least it appears to for a while. Graduate school felt, in many ways, like a continuation of the survival strategy I had already perfected. Work harder. Publish more. Stay useful. Stay impressive. Stay indispensable. I treated exhaustion as normal because exhaustion had always been normal to me. Hypervigilance translated easily into academic overachievement. Perfectionism became professional discipline. Dissociation became productivity. And because academia consistently romanticizes overwork, it became very easy to mistake trauma responses for intellectual commitment.

At the same time, however, graduate school and the academic job market intensified many of the exact conditions that C-PTSD tends to make especially difficult: instability, uncertainty, constant evaluation, financial precarity, inconsistent authority figures, and the continual pressure to prove one’s worth. Academia often requires people to exist in prolonged states of insecurity while still maintaining exceptionally high levels of cognitive and emotional performance. For someone with C-PTSD, that environment can become physiologically difficult.

Trauma is not simply emotional memory; it is also bodily conditioning. The body learns instability. It learns hyperalertness. It learns how to remain prepared for danger at all times. And eventually, remaining in environments that continually reproduce uncertainty and stress begins to feel like nervous system collapse.

At times, I thought I simply needed to become more disciplined, more resilient, more organized. I prided myself on my commitment to overwork. Academia encourages this interpretation because the profession consistently individualizes structural distress. Burnout, emotional overwhelm, and difficulty coping becomes evidence that one is simply not competitive enough. But over the last several years, and especially through therapy, I’ve begun understanding these experiences differently.

I’ve been learning more about C-PTSD and the ways trauma continues shaping the body long after the original circumstances have ended. And one of the more difficult realizations has been recognizing how profoundly academia reproduces many of the same conditions my nervous system was already trained to survive: unpredictability, instability, hypercompetition, constant vigilance, inconsistent validation, and the sense that safety is always conditional upon performance.

Recently, after another particularly difficult semester, I found myself confronting a realization that felt both obvious and painful: My body does not do well in academia.

Or perhaps more accurately, my body no longer wants to live in a constant state of survival simply because the profession normalizes it. I think for years I mistook my ability to endure academia for evidence that academia was sustainable for me. But endurance is not the same thing as health. Trauma survivors are often extraordinarily good at enduring impossible situations long after those situations have become harmful.

What I find especially difficult about this realization is that I still care deeply about intellectual life. I still love research. I still love literature, writing, and critical thought. The problem is not that the work itself lacks meaning. The problem is that the institutional conditions surrounding the work increasingly feel incompatible with the kind of nervous system regulation and stability I am trying, for the first time in my life, to build.

Therapy has forced me to think differently about what success actually means. I think I am beginning to understand that a life organized entirely around hypervigilance and overperformance is not actually safety, even when institutions reward it. And perhaps this is one of the things academia exploits most effectively: people who have already learned to equate exhaustion with worthiness because universities consistently reward those most willing to override their bodies in service of productivity.

Until eventually the body refuses. Instead of being caught in a semesterly-cycle of overwork and bodily crash, I need to learn a different way of living. A different way of continuing on with the parts of academia that bring joy and meaning into my life, while still honouring my body that keeps the score.

I got the degrees. I got the funding—even the extremely competitive kind. I got two publishing contracts before I had finished my PhD. I said yes to things that didn’t pay because they were “good for my CV.” I learned how to sound confident about work I wasn’t sure anyone would ever read. I volunteered for service positions and helped recruit students to my graduate program. I sat through workshops on “navigating the academic job market” led by people who hadn’t been on the job market in 20+ years.

And at no point did anyone say: this might not work, and not because of you.

Instead, they said things like:
“It’s competitive.”
“Timing matters.”
“You just need to publish a book.”

What they meant was: there are hundreds of you, and oftentimes we already know who we’re hiring.

I’m writing this from Ontario in 2026, where universities are simultaneously expanding and shrinking—taking in more students, cutting more costs, and building a workforce of highly trained, deeply replaceable , and precariously employed people. In the face of Trump and so many US academics seeking refuge in Canada, the situation has only become worse for Canada’s talent.

This is where the idea of the “Almost Professor” comes in.

“Almost Professor” isn’t self-deprecating. It’s a job category. It’s the space between what you trained for and what you’re allowed to become. It’s sessional contracts, postdocs that expire, and job postings that supposedly prioritize Canadian citizens but bend quickly to the prestige of US universities. It’s being told you’re exceptional in private and treated as disposable in practice. It’s also the possibility that you may never become the professor you’d dreamed you’d be.

If you’re in academia, you already know this. You’ve watched people move across the country for jobs that last eight months. You’ve spent countless hours pulling together 50+ page job applications that nobody ever reads. You’ve rewritten your research statement so many times it no longer resembles anything you actually care about. You’ve applied for job after job only to hear that you weren’t seriously considered because you haven’t been on the job market for long enough.

You’ve probably wondered, quietly, if this is still worth it. I know I have.

So, this Substack is not a guide to succeeding in academia. There are already plenty of those, and they all assume the system works. This is a space where I explore the ideas, policies, and institutions that shape how we learn, think, and live—and how those systems (sometimes) go wrong.

Some essays will serve as a record of the structural absurdities and the moments that make you question how a profession built around knowledge, public intellectualism and ‘speaking truth to power’, and transforming lives can get it all so terribly wrong. I call this pulling back the curtain on academia.

Some will focus on key policy and funding issues in Ontario. I’ll explore the current state of education in Ontario both at the higher-ed level, and in elementary and secondary schools. Other essays examine research, AI, public policy, work, or the unexpected turns life takes when things don’t go according to plan.

Some stories will be mine, and deeply personal. Some will come from others who are living the same reality and can’t say it out loud. But none of them are exaggerated. If anything, they’ll be restrained. Because one of the first things you learn in academia is that speaking up and speaking out is often the best way to be pushed into obscurity.

Class is in session. It’s time to spill the tea.

Subscribe now

Welcome to The Almost Professor!

Have you tried to become a professor? Currently working in academia? Feeling the unrelenting exhaustion and disappointment that comes with being a professor and living within the current structure of academia?

I spent years training to become a professor. I never became one. Instead, I chose to walk away.

It turns out that stepping outside academia gave me a different perspective—one that values curiosity, accessibility, and living my life outside of the constraints of the ivory tower.

The Almost Professor is where I explore the ideas and institutions that shape how we learn, think, and live. Some essays pull back the curtain on higher education. Others examine research, AI, public policy, chronic pain, work, or the unexpected turns life takes when things don’t go according to plan.

What connects them is a simple belief: understanding the world begins with asking better questions.

This isn’t a newsletter about having all the answers. It’s about learning in public, thinking critically, and finding meaning where research, lived experience, and everyday life intersect.

If you’re curious about how knowledge is created, challenged, and applied—or you’re simply someone who enjoys thoughtful essays that leave you seeing the world a little differently—welcome.

Class is in session.