Many of us in academia face worries about an uncertain future. As an undergraduate, exams, assignments, exchanging information via auditory and visual cues with other members of the species1, then as one moves through the pipeline there’s funding, publications, the expectation that you know something about something, what will I be when I eventually grow up2, and I haven’t even mentioned the perennial question that is, what am I going to cook tonight?!
I have faced all of these worries and more, and will no doubt continue to, but through talking to my peers, mentors and family, I’ve learnt a few lessons that have proved invaluable for me, and perhaps will be for you as well.
Before we go on, a content warning: I want to talk about anxiety. By which I mean worry for the future, in the face of uncertainty. If you are currently facing difficult circumstances, this may not be the advice you need, please seek out friends and professionals. If you have not a worry in the world, you may also need the opposite advice, in which case consult your nearest news outlet.
Firstly, anxiety is an emotion. It is not a rational construction of reality. It will often latch onto whatever happens to be going on in your life. If you don’t know why you’re anxious, the takeaway is, you don’t need to find a reason. It’s a feeling, and perhaps playing some sleeping, eating, or doing a fun activity will take your mind to a better place. Becoming a private investigator into what specifically in your life is causing the feeling is likely unproductive. If on the other hand you do think you know why you’re anxious, that’s ok, but try to come back to the realisation that you would be anxious regardless of that thing. For me this is most obviously manifest when some first anxiety is lifted (e.g. the assignment is handed in), only to be almost immediately replaced with another, that was present all along (the party tomorrow night), but previously had not caused a second thought. I don’t believe this is because both were worthy of angst, it is because neither are, and the anxious mind will choose whatever is easiest to worry about at any given moment.
Secondly, anxiety is a form of hallucinating the future. It is about projecting a model of reality forward in time. Here’s the thing though. We are not very good at predicting the future, because the world is complex, and there are simply too many factors to possibly make good predictions. Furthermore, anxiety is about imagining the worst outcomes, and focusing on those. Perhaps not the worst possible outcomes, but the outcomes that are undesirable, stressful, and seem plausible enough to warrant attention. This is where I think a difference can be made. You’ll first need to acknowledge that your projection of the future is a fiction! And perhaps not a particularly happy one. Now, does it really benefit you to be spending most of your forward modelling time on understanding the paths that lead to undesirable outcomes? If you are going to hallucinate the future, I have been told, and found it very helpful, to realise that you might as well imagine a positive future, in which things work out and the outcomes are good. This does not mean that’s the way things will go, and you still need all the other skills (resilience, grit etc.) for when things don’t go your way. It doesn’t mean giving up on rational thought or planning, and it doesn’t mean blindly jumping into things with disregard for the hurdles. Instead, you now can pursue what you want to pursue, and enjoy doing it, without knowing what will really happen, and in the meantime, enjoying the ride.
Choosing my fictional story of the future to be a positive one, by intentionally practicing optimism, has made me happier, more resilient, and more eager to pursue projects that might otherwise have seemed insurmountable. In fact they might still be, but the journey is already proved far more exciting and worthwhile than I could ever have imagined.
- “socialising” ↩︎
- Actually, unlike the other professions, we academics have well established strategies to avoid ever needing to answer this one! ↩︎
