Postdoc blues
When you are finishing a PhD and transitioning into postdoc, you really feel like you should be moving up in the world. In fact you are moving down.
By finishing a PhD, you sort of gain an eponymous crank. You turn the crank by hand on one end and science comes out the other end. You learned the technical aspects of your field, like math and coding and key ideas. You learned the soft skills like writing manuscripts, reviewing papers, giving talks, searching literature. The position of having the crank is supposed to be the place where you generate science while collecting a salary higher than you did as a grad student.
Since you know the basics now, the more salient career questions come front and center. How to choose topics and projects? How to get into internal and external collaborations? How to get into the right authorship positions on papers? How to network? Which conferences to go to? What are you supposed to optimize for?
Like many other careers driven by social valuation, one's career in science is driven by positive feedback: success begets success. But before you strike upon your first success, you draw lottery tickets hoping that someone decides to care about your work. Each ticket, mind you, is expensive, to the tune of a paper, and we know how much effort one's first ever published paper takes. But what are you going to do if your lottery tickets lose? Success depends not on drawing, but on winning. Once you start winning, you can keep it going, with steady scientific output one's reputation also grows steady. You just need to start the feedback cycle.
A scientist's choice of the first few lottery tickets has a spectrum of options. On one end of the spectrum there is an established, competitive field where the problems and goals are known. In a way, there is a collectively known crank that you can learn to turn. Of course, competitive science is rife with its challenges. You can be scooped by a rival lab or an overzealous lab mate. You might feel like a cog in the machine, doing exactly the same thing as everyone else. The success in this field is often driven by having access to the right equipment or reagents. In extreme cases, turning the crank produces Science instead of science. Many of my contemporaries sit so close to this end of the spectrum that they don't recognize the spectrum exists.
The other end of the spectrum is hipster science. Hipster science is attractive precisely for the reason of being unpopular. Its goal is to make the uncool cool again, and move on. Hipster science requires plenty of technical prowess, it is technically no easier or harder than the mainstream. There are plenty of ideas in the literature (most of them uncool), you just need to find them and piece them together into your very own artisanal crank.
Making a trajectory of research projects one navigates the competitive/hipster trade-off. Do you want to be the hot stuff? Just until your boyfriend steals your samples. Do you want to be unscoopable? Great, then your best work is shouting into the void, and the void doesn't cite back. Somewhere in between there is the wide and magical Goldilocks zone where papers come out but are also recognized by the community and generate impact. We measure this impact in different ways to distinguish some shades between abysmal failure and brilliant success. But however you measure it, success varies randomly over many orders of magnitude. And also that point before the orders of magnitude start, known as zero.
We hope to live in some sort of a fair world, which approximately means that "good" behaviors are rewarded and "bad" behaviors are punished. In an unfair world action and reward are not correlated: you don't get to praise people's success or berate their failure because both are arbitrary. We don't live at either of those extremes, at least I don't. I live in the world of small sample sizes, where the pattern of rewards and punishments is not consistent enough to infer fairness. Some of my contemporaries got wildly successful, and I cannot tell if they are geniuses or just got really lucky - you can't tell once the feedback flywheel winds up. For me, the feedback hasn't yet kicked in. If there was a bit more feedback, perhaps a bit of intuitive reinforcement learning could have taught me the strategy. Find what sells. Do this to get an impact. Press F to pay respects. At least certain actions give rewards.
What happens if you just do the certain actions repeatedly? Nothing bad, right? You get to answer important scientific questions, help humanity, yada yada. But the price of lottery tickets, whether competitive or hipster, is not just in time and effort and opportunity cost. You should not forget the part of the soul you put in. The hours, the motivation, the thoughts during showers and exercise, the secret extra special sauce, the love baked into making a paper, your shout into the void. It is people with well-formed cranks that see this hidden price tag. It's only when you have a crank that you think how much soul it would cost you to turn it on this problem, and how much on that one. I don't know how many horcruxes can one make, how much soul they use up, and how it comes back.
Some older and wiser colleagues urge me to not think of it as a unidirectional sellout, soul for glory. They think of it as an investment of a risky variety. If you make it through, you get your soul back. So an optimistic crank-wielder can make their way through science, trying to balance idealism and pragmatism. After all, lottery tickets are also an investment because one can win, they are not a guaranteed scam. Right?
Being a postdoc is antsy and nerve-wracking. The lack of firm ground, of job security ensures that one cannot be complacent, cannot sit on the laurels of a defended dissertation for there are many others to take one's place. Life around you keeps happening, including dramatic and terrible things, but your employer could care less. The top philosophers of the United States are debating the problems of causality, free will, and whiteness. The top philosophers of my country are debating when to switch from a hunger strike to a dry hunger strike while sitting in prison under no accusation. Not to mention a global pandemic, the cumulative effects of which don't go away when you don a trusty KN95.
Academic world can be practically a total institution. It is my current career, but also the origin of many personal relationships, a major source of entertainment, and a conduit for my service to what I think are the virtues. It is also the condition of my immigration status. When you add soul investment into this already volatile mix, it is easy to lose perspective and go insane. Perhaps I get so cranky because I love the job more than I should.