There’s an old movie called Gaslight. In it, the husband attempts to convince his wife and the people around them that she’s crazy by changing small things in her environment and then telling her she’s imagining them.

Gaslighting has become a colloquialism for any situation in which someone is attempting to manipulate someone else’s sense of what is really happening.

The more I work with people who are unhappy in academia, the more I’m convinced that academic culture gaslights us as a matter of course.

A few examples

Jo Van Every and I cover some of this in our free Myths and Mismatches e-course, but there are a lot of stories academia tells itself that aren’t necessarily reflected in reality.

It’s about the Life of the Mind — but you’ll spend most of your time wrangling undergraduates and fighting with colleagues over very small things.

It provides an unparalleled opportunity for work / life balance — so long as “balance” means “you work at all hours and most holidays,” even if you can take your car in for an oil change at 2pm on a Thursday.

It’s a meritocracy — but who you know matters and thousands of qualified, passionate, excellent scholars can’t find work.

I’m overworked and miserable — but this is the best possible job in the whole world.

There are so many places where the story is different from the reality and calling out the reality is tantamount to saying the Emperor is showing his backside.

This isn’t deliberate

I’m not arguing that academia is deliberatly trying to make people insane. That would be going too far. But like every other relational system, it regulates itself by ensuring that everyone plays their role. Part of that includes people who are committed to academia defending it and justifying it to those of you who are unhappy or for whom the job just hasn’t materialized.

Sometimes we can see the gap between the story and the reality and, without discounting the reality, live inside the contradiction.

But when we’re in conflict with the system for whatever reason, we tend to doubt our own experience of reality.

I’m miserable, but maybe I’m just paying my dues and it will get better. There don’t seem to be any jobs, but maybe that’s just me being defeatist and I need to keep applying. I don’t think I like the work of being a professor, but what if this really is the best job in the world and everything else will suck even more?

When we hit that space of doubting our lived experience, it can feel impossible to get out of. We’re so trained to rely on experts — and we so rarely feel like an expert ourselves — that we can believe the stories are true.

This, right here, is one of the hardest parts about leaving: legitimizing your own experience and judgment and seeing the stories for what they are.

No one knows better than you do

No one knows your values better than you do. No one knows your limits better than you do. No one knows your preferences and desires better than you do. No one knows your satisfactions better than you do. No one knows your bottom line needs better than you do.

No one knows what you should do better than you do. And no one knows what you are and have been experiencing better than you do. It’s just not possible.

If you’re feeling really muddled and unsure, try articulating your experience without judgment. This happened and then this happened and then this happened. Write it down. Seeing it written down can give you enough distance to believe it, in a sense. And that makes it easier to see the stories as stories that may or may not explain your experience.

It’s not often one of the myths of academia becomes suddenly visible, but it happened this week with the publication of a Forbes article describing the least stressful jobs of 2013. Professor was #1 — the least stressful job.

And then Twitter exploded

All of the usual stories were trotted out: Professors are off between May and September and a month over the winter holidays. They don’t spend much time in the classroom. Sure, tenure-track people have some pressure to publish, but there aren’t really any deadlines and the environment is so cozy and civilized.

I’m not even kidding about that last part.

I’d have more sympathy for the writer, who was reporting on a careercast.com list rather than creating one herself, if she had done any actual research, but she admitted after her comments section exploded that she hadn’t.

You can imagine the responses she got. Professors detailing the insane hours they work, especially during those times “off.” Adjuncts upset that all university teaching jobs get lumped together as if they’re the same. Tenure-track people pointing out that there’s one big hefty deadline and it’s a do-or-die sort of thing.

Low stress, my ass.

Good stress and bad stress

Pretty much every job is going to have stress. Stress is, in fact, just a function of human life. But there’s productive stress and destructive stress, and the difference is important.

Productive stress is motivating. It gets us going and dealing with it feels like an accomplishment.

Destructive stress is, well, destructive. It demotivates us, it exhausts us, it wears us down, it takes away the will to do much of anything. Burnout is the natural endpoint of unchecked stress. Destructive stress lived through doesn’t feel like an accomplishment. If anything, destructive stress can make you feel like you’ve wasted your time.

Whether a given person experiences something as productive stress or destructive stress depends on a lot of things: the situation itself, other responsibilities, interest in and desire for the situation, general personality type.

Some people are going to find the schedule, tasks, and environment of academia motivating. By and large, assuming other parts of their lives don’t explode and there’s a reasonable amount of work-life balance, these people will enjoy being in academia.

Other people are going to find that the schedule, tasks, and environment gradually wear them down and make them miserable.

What does it feel like to you?

At any given moment, we can be overwhelmed by even the best situation, because shit happens, and if a family divorce, a mental health crisis, and overscheduling all hit at the same time, well, it will be an uncomfortable few months.

If in general, the situation feeds you, in general, it motivates you, then rock on. You’ve got a good thing going.

But if it doesn’t, if it’s always a slog, then it’s not the situation for you, no matter how many “least stressful” lists it tops, and no matter how good it looks on (completely inaccurate) paper.