Addicted to Humanity

“So why do people accept all these adjunct positions if the work conditions are so poor and these jobs never lead anywhere? How come they don’t see that this is not a smart thing to do? Like, what’s with the self-defeatism?” a woman asks her companion in the queue at Starbucks.

If it weren’t rude to butt into conversations (even ones between really obnoxious people), I could tell the condescending lady that people don’t leave because the work we do is completely addictive. Once you have experienced the joy of coming into a classroom, speaking at a conference, working on a research article, that’s it, you’ve been poisoned and will keep seeking out this potent drug for as long as you can crawl back onto campus.

I believe that the reason why we get so addicted to academia is that it provides access to the purest form of being human. What makes us human is our capacity to reason, to generate ideas, and to communicate them to other human beings who will then use them to generate ideas of their own. Seeing people get excited about knowledge, books, learning and being surrounded by those who know no greater joy than to fly away into the realm of ideas is an experience that redeems much of the humanity’s indisputable nastiness.

Yes, yes, I’m idealistic. And the academia is not perfect. Let’s try to move past stating the painfully obvious for a change.