Scientific Research as an Escape

I was already in the 4th year of my PhD before I began to understand my failure in being a PhD student, as well as what drives my passion for physics research. It was not until my personal mental breakdown that I could start to see where the problem lies - the pervasive underlying feeling that I do not belong anywhere. Stuck in imposter syndrome, unable to explain my thought process or ideas to anyone in the group and, many times, even to myself, my sense of self was completely shattered, and I was definitely convinced that I not only failed at being a PhD student but also at being a good human being. When I hit my rock bottom, I felt crushed to a point where I was almost ready to give up. Every single day, I used to envision quitting everything in my life, which at least was a respite from the overwhelming anxiety.

Slowly, I realized that I had been living my life by unconsciously putting on a masquerade that even I barely understood. When I reached a point where this masquerade no longer supported my struggles, I had no choice but to abandon it, which led to a severe sense of emptiness in life. I was left not even knowing what I was living my life for, while at the same time fighting my old obsessions and anxieties. So, whether I liked it or not, I had to start everything from scratch, and there have been several moments where I felt like an alien on Earth who did not know how the world functioned - even how to interact with other people.

In this ongoing journey to rebuild myself, I realized several things that I never could have seen in the past. Some of them are so utterly benign and trivial, they surprised me. For instance, I saw that the way I crossed my legs when I sit influences my state of anxiety and my spiraling thoughts. Others were so fundamental that they made me feel like I was back in kindergarten trying to learn how to live my life. Something that blew my mind was how little I knew how to relax myself at the end of the day - it seems I had not really relaxed my entire life! Whatever the reason, I think that such an emotional breakdown was necessary to shine a light on the glass castle my life and personality were built on. Being extremely sensitive to mundane stimuli while being ignorant of other important ones, I was unconsciously leading my life like a blind driver who thought that he could see it all. The most important thing has been to question what I was driving towards, and what was fueling me along the way - was it doing research, having a loving partner to build a life with, or something else altogether? I thought I knew, but I did not realize that I only thought I wanted those things because they were the only ones that made me feel less anxious - or, in other words, escape my anxiety!

As I was slowly coming to my senses, I started seeing other people through a cleaner lens - as normal people, without putting them on a pedestal as if I thought everyone was better off than me - and how adversely I affected their lives. It was comforting to see that most of us are still trying our best to figure life out, trying to understand one’s anxieties through individual paradigms of life - which are faulty at best. Even though they are subjective to each individual, I saw that a system (which is an organization with certain patterns of thoughts and behaviors) can exploit these faults, which are common to a wide section of the workers, to further its goals - either declared or clandestine. More importantly, I started to see the lapses in the systems I am part of, academia and scientific research communities, and how the masquerade it puts on eerily aligns with the one in my own individual life. It was clear that I was complicit in realizing the goal of these systems, which uphold hierarchy and maximize profits rather than being human-centric- which brings me to the topic.

“I am a man who has his share of human nature; therefore I am guilty with the rest and bear unaltered and indelibly within me the capacity and the inclination to do them (evil) again at any time… In reality we merely lacked a suitable opportunity to be drawn into the infernal melee.” - The Undiscovered Self; Carl Jung.

Academia as a system is very broad in how it manifests across different parts of the world, but regardless, it has many common elements that directly relate to our own individuality. Moreover, I was blind to many systemic paradigms and interpersonal behaviors which I could only uncover through learning about myself. With my experience in academia, while also coming across stories from several of my peers, I strongly believe that the current scientific research is driven by insecurities and political pressures (which is no surprise), rather than a genuine curiosity that is connected to society as a whole. Instead of being the centers of collective societal development, universities seem to have become isolated academic bubbles where they have almost no direct interactions with their local communities. With most resources being poured into research with the goal of either advancing capitalist industries or grandiose dreams of splitting an atom or launching space mirrors, scientific research seems to be fundamentally disconnected from humanity.

Intellectualizing Through Research

Scientific research is multifaceted and multilayered, where it is very easy to lose ourselves, and unfortunately, it has been just that for me. As a curious kid - when I liked to tinker, be creative with electronics, or think about astronomy in high-school - I thought I knew that I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. I remember being holed up on mini-projects for several hours, forgetting my surroundings and also my hunger. All the time, I used to think that I could actually be good at what I had been doing, which was kinda enough to push me all the way to getting admitted to a PhD program, where I finally hit a brick wall. As I lacked a strong sense of self, most of my personality was built around the coping mechanisms I developed as a toddler. These very coping mechanisms, which helped me to get through some tough entrance examinations, academic coursework, and a few research projects in the past, were no longer enough to sustain myself through the current part of my life - both professional and personal. Surprisingly, I slowly realized that I was trying to use my passion as a means of escape.

“Probably, the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.” – Kenyon College commencement speech, 2005; David Foster Wallace.

Wallace, in the commencement speech at Kenyon College, shares a parable of two young fish swimming along when they encounter an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish says, “Morning, boys! How’s the water?” After they swim along for a little while, one of the young fish turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?” This parable clearly illustrates the very important aspect of abstractions we live our lives in, that we barely even question. This is not a new parable in any way; there are analogous ones in many cultures, but I suppose we somehow forget to think about them. Maybe because we think we obviously live our lives according to them, and under this pretext of being obvious we escape our fear of confronting our own tragic selves. Or just maybe, we thought we already dealt with them a while back or that we are too busy doing research to even ask that question.

The form of scientific research that is currently taught in academia is a perfect tool to help us intellectualize our emotional fears. To intellectualize, we need to be invested in an activity that somehow seems productive, but is also quite never-ending. An escape which we can perpetually delve into, and thus, is no longer just an escape but becomes a way of life by itself. More crudely, it’s like being drunk without knowing that you are drinking - like the fish swimming through water in Wallace’s parable. This characteristic of academic research gives us a way to abstract our lives from the societies around us. Before becoming a researcher in quantum computing, my initial motivation was that it seems to have a very wide impact if it ever comes to fruition - in terms of development in material sciences, biology, and many others - and also it is a very interesting problem to work on. On a surface level, this did not seem like a bad motivation to have. Though, the problem is that I did not ask any deeper questions - What does impact mean? How would it affect the society around me? How is my current work affecting the people around me? More importantly, what is the part of my self-image that my work fits into? As I was only concerned with escaping my anxiety, which is through proving myself through my achievement in research, the above vague explanation sufficed as the rest of my mind was involved in trying to grapple with infinite facets of research, which obviously seemed much more difficult and so more worth my time than to grapple with the questions of societal impact (I thought it was a sociologist’s job, and I am not one). Moreover, I was undeniably convinced that research is the only way to make myself seen in this world, to make myself seen in my own eyes. As a result, I just continued to push myself without properly questioning or exploring my intentions and purpose - until my identity collapsed onto itself.

Psychological escape thrives in an environment that is built on abstractions, and academia is a perfect breeding ground. It is not a new lesson that our emotional insecurities seek an escape, as the only way to deal with them is to make our self-image malleable - and this is no easy task, specifically when the systems we are a part of force us to be defensive. So, an abstracted and widely accepted ideal is much easier to accept as an explanation for our insecurity than to stay grounded in the nuanced reality - which results in a much more rigid view of the self and our surroundings. In this situation, we tend to find faults with others for any source of anxiety, compounded by the existing systemic hierarchy which strongly perpetuates patriarchal and dogmatic paradigms. As a lot of the students and professors are stuck dealing with this survival fear, the central objective of doing research these days is more about having x-number of publications/citations or being lost in problem solving, rather than practicing the skill of asking important questions.

The irony is that the philosophy part of ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ seems to be largely missing in the scientific PhD academic programs. There is almost no emphasis on learning about the philosophy or history of science; most critical questions that challenge the already well-accepted beliefs are either brushed over or met with passive aggression, and finally, most of the scientific peer review (at least in physical sciences) is single blind (which makes it much easier to perpetuate existing personal bias). As most of us are too busy to survive in a structure which is designed to extract a specific outcome from every individual, we barely even have time to engage in a philosophical discourse in a meaningful way, which I think is essential to foster creativity, a critical aspect of scientific research.

Escape as a way of life.

“Everybody I’ve met… were all the same. Drinking… women… worshiping God… family… the King… dreams… children… power… everybody had to be drunk on something to keep themselves going. Everyone’s… a slave to something!” - by Kenny Ackermann (character) in Attack on Titan; Hajime Isayama.

As remarked in one of my all-time favourite quotes by the character Kenny Ackermann in Attack on Titan, we all unknowingly choose a way to mask our existential dread and move on. The longer we do not understand this existential dread (or, in plain words, as put by the comedian Alok Menon: “We should be talking about the fact that we’re all going to f…king die!”), the longer we keep looking for an external problem to solve or fix, which can give ourselves meaning. But, even though we try our best to find something in the world outside to fix - either research to advance knowledge, be meaningful to ourselves and others, or be helpful to underrepresented communities - we forget to see the fissures we ourselves bear, which become the point of conflict in our paradigms of the world. In modern scientific communities, it seems that for a lot of us, research is what we seem to be drunk on.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that being ‘drunk’ on research does not mean you are not a good researcher or that you are not passionate. It is just that we forgot the reason why we do research in the first place (at least most of us), as the motivation is fueled by the internal desire to subdue the existential dread rather than to do research for the sake of passion - which is to create and explore the world we live in. For a lot of us doing research, this might seem too obtuse or metaphysical to talk about, or even plain unrelatable. This might be because we unknowingly became experts at escaping, specifically by pointing at the peak and being imperceptive to the climb, which is the action that impacts us and our surroundings. It is through this hasty climb that we inadvertently cause harm to others. As the only thing in sight is the peak, which is what we ascribe to our sense of self, we are too quick to accept already existing structures and behaviors and also unknowingly pass them on to others as part of the mindless climb. I’m sure you all have heard of generational trauma in families, so let me call this a generational trauma in academia, which passes through the chain of professors, their students, and so on.

Academia has its own set of metaphorical ‘peaks’: for graduate students, it is to publish more papers and be on their professor’s good side; for professors, it is to get citations by publishing more frequently, getting more grants, and securing tenure. These tasks are so involved in their own way, further compounded by the pressure from the university leadership on the professors to procure grants, which ultimately trickles down to the grad students. This kind of environment, whose sole aim is to churn out more numbers (in terms of money, publications, or citations), adds a final cherry on top - fostering isolation, which closes this vicious cycle to keep the entire systemic structure self-sustaining. This very isolation makes it much harder to learn about our self, as our perception of self-image is largely dependent on our self-reflection through our relationships with other individuals. As isolation in the community makes it even harder to be happy, it increases individual anxiety and animosity towards others, thus furthering the divide between the self and our perception of others.

“Nothing estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity… His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him… This task is so exacting, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being.” - The Undiscovered Self; Carl Jung.

The other very important facet of an intellectual escape is how it results in a rigid and abstract sense of self. To escape our insecurities, we are quick to not only build coping mechanisms through abstract notions, but also justify them vehemently, which we scientists are pretty good at. The urge to escape our fears is so deep and imperceptible, yet influences almost every single part of our lives - all the way from relationships to how we approach research and learning. With the fundamental drive, along with all our mental and physical resources, allocated to finding the answer to ‘how the universe works?’, we no longer consider exploring our self as being necessary. A symptom of the same is the tendency to be overly critical of psychological/anthropological (for instance) studies, saying that they are not as rigorous as physical sciences in terms of furnishing numbers - which became the sole goal of most modern sciences and is somehow more important, as it claims to represent the ‘absolute reality’. In my opinion, I think that this reasoning is one of the important drivers behind the technological utopia - the view that technology is the answer to all the problems in the world (currently seen as the hype around AI and quantum computing). This reasoning, however, has the fallacious assumption that ultimately everything can be boiled down to scientific experiments and numbers, and thus devalues one’s own emotions and individuality. If so, it is not surprising that the billionaires in the world also see all of humanity as numbers in a database and nothing more!

Individual Agency

It is a known fact that most of the capitalist industries and politicians work with the sole aim of increasing numbers (mostly profits), indirectly influencing politics, and also academia, which is funded by both. In this scheme of things, it is naively seen to be okay to remain passive and cynical, thinking that we cannot really change anything for the better. Though, this purview only seems so cynical as the entities it is concerned with are so abstracted out from our surroundings and our personal life. The government and the president, genocide/war happening on the other side of the planet, MNC’s and huge corporations, all the conversations on social media, or a protest happening across the city - regardless, they are all real happenings in the real world; in our subjective purview are abstracted out and are far out of reach. We can surely raise our voice, which is very important and does have important consequences, but that by itself is not enough. We also need to understand our own personal role through the fabric of society we currently live in, without which it is just another escape.

“Whether the crime lies many generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that is always and everywhere present… In fact, negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil… On the contrary, they lead to projection of the unrecognized evil onto the ‘other’… It would be an insufferable thought that we had to take personal responsibility for so much guiltiness. We therefore prefer to localize the evil with individual criminals or groups of criminals, while washing our hands in innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil.” - The Undiscovered Self; Carl Jung.

By calling ourselves innocent or separate from the ‘evil’ in the world, we are not only absolving our ethical conscience of any responsibility, but also being blind to all the elements which are among our very midst as projections of the broader ‘evil’. These projections are subtle, and so can be brushed off easily - making our current environment somehow separate from the larger tragedy in world politics. This abstraction critically makes us feel more alone, and removes our agency to connect with the broader society in a meaningful way. We end up being cogs in a machine, having no idea of what our impact is - and the euphemistic/bureaucratic terminology used by people in the systems around us furthers this alienation. Here, academia is a perfect example where the perceived isolation of the individuals is taken as a de facto nature of the job, and thus also makes it easier for one to mentally disconnect themselves from their surroundings.

University as a Utopia

Trying to impact our local community is a direct way to interact with and understand the wider world. As a student of the university, I also have the indirect privilege, and also responsibility, to affect the larger society in the world. More importantly, being a part of this influential system, I, as an individual, do not have a choice not to make an impact; the only choice I have is to decide on the way I can impact the larger world. Not making a choice, or being apolitical, is still a choice, and in this case we are letting the systems decide the impact we have on our surroundings. Finally, the more influential the system we are a part of, the larger the impact. We, being a part of some of the richest universities on the planet, have a tremendous responsibility to shape the utopia of the society everyone is going to live in. Unfortunately, universities actually are some of the toughest environments to work in, specifically for graduate students and faculty.

The toxic dynamic between the faculty, students, and university leadership makes academia one of the harshest environments to work in and is known to have high rates of depression in comparison to the general public. Many of those who survive/thrive are either acclimated or have just accepted the toxicity as part of the job description - which leaves a very good chance for these individuals to carry it forward. However, universities, being the center of excellence, also serve as a medium for novel thought and nucleation sites for societal transformation. Given the harsh environments the students are made to survive, ironically, it is also pretty logical to expect them to lead the same harshness into the society outside. As grad students from elite schools end up heading research labs or managing huge businesses, they also have access to a direct medium to affect society. Thus, the universities can be seen as a micro reflection of the wider society. If we are unable to create a sense of community for the members in a university (which I argue that we fail to do), I think it is hard to expect or ask for the same in the world outside.

Northwestern University has more than thirty-five thousand members, combining students, faculty, and staff, though it is a very common experience to feel as if it is not even a community. Taking the case of interactions among students, I have heard arguments such as: graduate students in general are more introverted, which I think is just an excuse to ignore the systemic toxicities that force them to be so. Another argument is that it is students’ responsibility to make an effort to connect with other members of the community. Well, sure, to an extent, I guess, but one cannot expect birds to flock in when there are no trees. On Northwestern’s campus, specifically around Tech, it is hard to find a space that encourages interaction among peers. Moreover, a bar of Snickers is as expensive in Tech Express as it is at an airport. Clearly, the environment discourages interactions between peers. Similarly, the interaction between the different sections in the university is almost non-existent. For instance, the faculty body barely interacts with the students except through some departmental events, and there is no significant communal interaction between the admin and staff and any other section of the university. As most of the interactions are limited to bureaucratic necessities, individual human connections are just abstracted out to an agreement or a paycheck. What a community needs is proper third-spaces, where people from different sections of the university can mingle on an equal informal footing. Unfortunately, the number of third spaces is fewer now than ever before, even outside the university.

A third space, in my opinion, needs to satisfy three criteria. First, it needs to be open for a wide window of time, both during the day and at night. Second, the food/drinks that it offers should be very affordable to every person in the ecosystem, as fostering community interaction and not profits is the main goal. Third, this place should not only be accessible to students in the university, but also to anyone in the surrounding community. The feeling of isolation is not really just among the peers of the university, but also with anyone living on the outside. Having a place that allows casual, unplanned conversations is essential for several reasons. The most important one is the chance to interact with a wide section of society, meet people from different parts of the world belonging to different cultures, sexes, and ideologies. If we only interact with some of the people in the university, we are locked in our echo chambers while never coming across our ideological opposites, which furthers the polarization in the community. Such a situation makes it much easier to presuppose a person’s worth just based on their ideologies, while never trying to understand the subjective experiences that brought us all to have a certain predisposition. Seeing another person as a whole other individual requires us to first have an opportunity to interact with them in a setting where the personal boundaries can be lowered. This is never possible in any formal setting, as one is always expected to hold up a mask in order to fit in and survive. Whereas in a third space, there is no such expectation of being prepared with some reading material or a presentation, or being dressed in a given way. Having an ample number of third spaces is, in my opinion, one of the fundamental requirements in order to make sure that people feel like they are a part of the community.

Just to put your mind at ease, such places already exist for us to take inspiration from. The bar Cunneen’s in Rogers Park is a very good example of a third space. Being a regular there is such a joy, as I get to interact with such a wide section of the community - people who are artists, who work in the service industry, lawyers, doctors, masons and truck drivers, to people who work in NGO’s and people of different colors, sexes and ages. It pushes me out of my myopic perspective and helps me understand the problems from a much broader standpoint. Just going to Cunneen’s makes me feel like I am welcome to be a part of the community, and also teaches us to be much more tolerant of each other’s idiosyncrasies. Another such example is Archie’s, which used to be one of the local favorite places - a cafe in the morning that transformed into a bar in the evening. Given the huge amount of spending that went into either rebuilding the football stadium or the new shiny building next to Kellogg, making such a third space should not at all be a financial difficulty. Also, Luna’s at Norris does not count, as it is pricey and does not seem particularly welcoming as a bar that encourages interpersonal interactions (does not satisfy the criteria I mentioned previously).

In the utopia of a university that I envision, every section of the population on campus has a chance to frequently interact with other faculty and grad students, staff working in the admin, or the intercampus shuttle driver and the housekeeping staff in a setting which does not force them to perform a duty. I would like to chat with the shuttle driver about a kid they recently had, or listen to them complain about how they barely get a chance to pee in several hours, as they have a schedule which is so tightly packed. I would love to talk to another philosophy grad student about the ethics and limitations of my current academic purview, or share the distress of my recent breakup. More importantly, I would like to see how life has been for a person from a different community with widely different financial, personal, or sexual background. I can grow as an individual only if I get enough opportunities to understand the experiences of other people, and also form my own in my attempt to forge new relationships. I think that any transformation in society should have such a utopia in mind as an end goal in order to make sure that we are not inadvertently making it harder for one section of society. And this is not possible if we are not interacting and learning from other sections of the population on campus.

How about we not just ask, but demonstrate how well a community can be formed, and then advocate for the same? Despite the external pressures, such a community strives to look after each other in a much more resilient way than to depend on systems which act as band aids to harm that has already been perpetrated. Of course, several other parts need transformation, like protections for workers, creating equitable and diverse environments, making learning easier for the disenfranchised, etc, though none of them would have a chance to be sustainable in the long run unless we have a sense of community which helps us to see ourselves first, and others who live beside us.