Barbara Sher has famously said that “you can’t get enough of what you don’t really want.”

When you want to go on a nice long hike, you won’t be satisfied by sitting at the coffee shop writing, no matter how many treats you give yourself. When you want to read trashy novels, you won’t be satisfied by reading high literature, no matter how good they are.

You can get caught up in what you think you’re supposed to want, and then feel restless and dissatisfied when you get it, because it wasn’t what you really wanted.

But instead of recognizing that it wasn’t what you really wanted, you blame yourself or think that if you just keep pushing through, you’re going to love it sooner or later.

If you’re dissatisfied, you aren’t getting what you want

It’s risky to acknowledge what you really want, especially if what you really want doesn’t fit the narrative you’re trying to live or that the people around you are living.

It turns out I’m a much bigger fan of popular culture than I am of “high art.” When I was a graduate student in English, I felt guilty about watching romantic comedies and liking pop music, because it was all about the Coen brothers and musicians I’d never heard of.

My then-boyfriend was obsessed with Keanu Reeves, but that was different because he somehow shoehorned Reeves’ acting into Deleuzian theory. Another friend of ours was obsessed with Arnold Schwartzenegger, but that was different because he wrote papers about him.

I didn’t want to analyze it, theorize about it, or write about it. I just wanted to enjoy it. I kept a lot of what I loved to myself.

Aesthetics are small potatoes when it turns out you don’t want academia and everyone around you thinks it’s the brass ring. When the story is that the academic life is wonderful and flexible, but it’s just stressing you the hell out, trying to talk yourself into seeing it as wonderful and flexible isn’t going to make you happier about it.

The only way to be satisfied is to go after what you really want

If you’re unhappy, take some time to think about what it is you really, actually want. Not what you’re supposed to want, or what you think you should want because you’d be a different kind of person if you wanted it, but what you actually want.

When you can name it, you can figure out how to get it. But if you don’t acknowledge it, you’ll remain dissatisfied. And this life is too interesting and rich for that.

A friend of mine is studying in Paris for a few weeks. The studying is great. Paris, not so much.

As she put it, she’s not the kind of person who is optimally built for big cities. It’s too big, too loud, too energetic, too much. She’s longing for a little place in the country with nothing but a few cows for company.

Geography counts

This struck me because there’s a cultural narrative, especially prevalent among overeducated people, that privileges the coasts and the cities and denigrates everything else. Somehow, if you’re smart, you’re supposed to prefer cosmopolitan and dense and full of cultural activities.

When people in academia talk about the way geography matters, it’s usually about not being willing to take jobs in small towns in rural areas. That’s completely fair — for some people, cities are life-giving.

But for some people, it’s just the opposite. Cities are overwhelming and exhausting; smaller places in less dense parts of the world are freeing and supportive.

Admitting this, however, is hard in a context in which these things have a distinct hierarchy.

You do not have to apologize

When I coach people who are leaving academia, one of the things we talk about is geography. Where are they now? What constraints are there in where they can live? Where do they want to live?

Time and time again, people who want to live in the cities just say it, confident that everyone understands why that’s important. But the people who don’t want to live in cities invariably jump into defending where they do want to live. There’s family there, or their partner has a job there. On some level, they’re a little embarrassed to admit to where they want to live.

It always makes me sad, because the presumption that we are all the same, that we all want (or should want) the same things in the same way ends up leaving a lot of people feeling needlessly ashamed and embarrassed.

It’s not just geography

It goes far beyond city mouse and country mouse. A colleague of mine from graduate school realized she really wanted to work at a small branch campus, not an R1. She liked the size, she loved teaching, and it was all around a better fit for her.

Some of the faculty never quite forgave her for that.

But why do we think every scholar wants an R1 position? Because they have more prestige. Why do we think cities are better? More prestige. Why do we think academia is better than other kinds of work? More prestige.

When we don’t actually want the thing that comes with more prestige, we often assume it means we’re defective somehow. There’s something wrong with us if we don’t want the city, the R1, the academic job.

Why, though, should we all be the same? The academics I know are a wildly varied lot, and there’s not a whole lot you can say unites them other than an awful lot of education. There’s nothing wrong with being different from the person in the next office over, and there’s nothing wrong with liking things that aren’t coded as the most prestigious ever.

No one is going to give you gold stars on your deathbed for being prestigious. Your only job is to craft a life that is satisfying and meaningful to you. If that means living in the country, if that means working at a branch campus, if that means leaving altogether, then rock on.

What matters to you is what matters to you, no matter how it’s coded in the larger culture.