Pocketful of Lint

a personal blog

The American rat race, er, dream?

Productivity seems to be more the American dream than having a nice suburban home with a white picket fence around it. The mentality is always to “go, go, go” and who cares about getting eight hours of sleep or eating lunch away from your desk or naps. There’s a condition called impostor syndrome in which people feel like they’re too inadequate for where they are in life or how they’re perceived. There should be a syndrome for feeling like you never work hard enough. Maybe the “always behind syndrome,” or ABS. Then people can brag about having ABS while secretly wishing they had abs.

I don’t know of a single person in my everyday life who would say they’re comfortable with their amount of work output. To try to be on par, some put in extra hours at night, some work on weekends, and some do both. The way graduate school is set up exacerbates the problem. Progress is difficult to measure, if not impossible. An objective evaluation would have to be tailored to the specific individual and the specific project, especially because some projects are paved for success while others are a swampy serpentine mess. Sure, one could do a self-evaluation, but you’re already biased if you feel like you’re not working hard enough. Maybe you could go to your advisor if you get over the fear of bringing to their direct attention that you’re not working hard enough.

Struggling with one’s self-image in work is analogous to struggling with one’s self-image in dating. You wonder why things aren’t working out, why you’re not reaching the goal of writing that paper or committing to a significant other. And you wonder, is it them, or is it me? Maybe this project is actually that absurd, and that’s why I’m wallowing in the same area for months. Or, maybe it’s me, and if someone else were in my shoes, they would’ve already done it by now. That mental train of thought keeps going and going and you just hope that your wheels can keep spinning fast enough without blowing out.

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