Hey everyone. I really am sorry. I am doing a really shitty job keeping up with this newsletter, and it hasn't really been because I'm busy, but more because I'm struggling to have thoughts that feel interesting. It has been a year of a lot of inner turmoil (and growth!), I guess I am busy, but busy with non-remunerable life stuff that doesn't scan as real to anyone in our capitalist hellscape. (Sidebar: I saw a pastel-colored pop psych infographic about "internalized capitalism" and its symptoms today.)
Maybe internalized capitalism isn't as silly as it sounds... maybe it's just alienation, in the psychological sense or the phenomenological sense (the feeling of being alienated) rather than the strictly Marxist sense of the products of my labor being alien-able from me. The container for all my tedious crises and upsets, the big nesting doll that holds them all, is my journey through and out of academia, which is to say my journey of identity dissolution, formation, and dissolution again. This is why I don't have any good ideas right now. Since I am no longer an academic, I'm no longer subjectified as an ideas-haver. There's no nice sticky matrix of connective tissue holding me in relation to other people who are thinking, or writing. I've only been spiraling one way, inward, away from people and the kind of intellectual exchange that keeps the little flame burning. I feel like I have a gray heap of cold, spent embers right where my diaphragm is.
I was so fucking good, as an academic. I was also killing myself in a million ways, and the killing myself was what made me so good. I was bright, original, overflowing with great ideas, and diligent enough to execute a fair number of them. What happened to me? I got disenchanted. I was always pretty disenchanted with the system of academia. I got disenchanted with the work itself, the only kind of work I have ever really loved and wanted to do. It was starting to happen pre-2020. You allow yourself to question what one psychometric scale or Census-derived social inequality index is really measuring, or what regression models really are, and heretical thoughts start creeping in. What really did me in, though, was obviously COVID, the spectacle of all of it, how eager I was to be a dog in everyone else's fight (I think this was a good quality for some very worthwhile COVID fights, but is a trait I would like to get better at recognizing in myself so I can counter it as far as day to day operations of living are concerned).
One of the minor tragedies of this journey for me is that COVID intensified the heretical thoughts, and for a time, it seemed like -- for the first time ever -- somebody was listening. Original thinking of any kind in epidemiology is flatly unwelcome; we are to memorize the Healthy People 20XX objectives, complete the modules, perform the rote statistical operations, compose the awkward papers, try to get some money, and repeat. Suddenly, everyone's eyes were on my field, and it turned out I had a valuable perspective to share that people wanted to hear. For a moment. This is where the Marxist sense of alienation comes in. I'm a big dumbass, tweeting all my good thoughts, because good thoughts are free and should be shared. Or so I thought. Good thoughts are also alienable, and time and time again, it has been demonstrated to me that my ideas are desirable and productive -- and even more so when they aren't attached to me but rather free-floating, Vogelfrei, appropriable by anyone with some institutional credentials to just plug-and-play in their templates for doing equity-focused research or whatever the fuck.
I don't necessarily mind this, I don't feel proprietary about ideas, but what I want people to understand is that 2023 was a year of total rejection for me. Every single thing I am, everything I've done or cared about, everything I poured time into -- not anymore, bitch! Watching people share high-profile papers, commentaries, lectures, and media appearances reheating better ideas I had first, watching people who really have treated me poorly on a personal basis just move on while I continue to flounder in the professional wilderness (all the while bravely posting about how important solidarity, that abstract concept, is -- totally unbearable) -- to be totally blunt, it sucks. It hurts.
This is really just one little eddy in the much bigger swirl of what the fuck is going on with my intellectual life. Okay, so I stop being an academic, but I can't stop killing myself, and this time, the little boss is inside my own head, speaking with my own voice. Impelling me forward but not strongly enough, with no structure to catch me, and then just berating me for not being able to transform the worst year of my life into a smashing professional success in eight months. Anything I'm doing, I should be doing something else. (Literally, I spend hours every day berating myself about this. Duh, talk about bad time management!) I should have something to show for all this free time. I should be constantly producing, constantly doing, finishing, completing, checking off. Of course this is not where the real interesting thinking gets done. But I guess I am feeling the burning need to cover my vulnerable state with, like, at least one token of legible, legitimate, professional or personal success.
I'm waffling about whether to send this, because I don't have a note to end it on. I'm still swimming in all this. I want to believe there's still something in here (my cold, snuffed-out chest) that stirs with curiosity. With some modest success, I have been trying to reenchant myself, first of all by finding my way back to reading -- just fiction, just for fun, whenever I want, not in service of developing any argument or thesis or completing any damn thing. Just what I used to do as a kid, sitting down and reading whatever I feel like for as long as I feel like. I am hopeful I can recapture at least something of what I previously enjoyed so much. That's where you'll find me in between newsletters. Until next time, namaste.