“Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate.” — Jung
A question I’d like to put to this forum:
What parts of yourself do you have to leave at the door when you walk into your lab, your seminar, your conference?
The implicit dress code for a scientist is well-known: objective, dispassionate, no visible faith, no visible spirituality, no visible sexuality, no visible weakness, no visible fear, precise, articulate, hopeful in moderation, never too excited, never too tired. We’re supposed to be a kind of disembodied intellect with a name attached. “Brain on a stick.” The actual humans underneath — with our hidden hopes, our private despair, our biases, our weird intuitions, our religious or anti-religious convictions, our bodies, our heartbreaks, our doubts about whether any of this matters — that person is supposed to stay home.
And then we’re surprised when PhDs drive people to depression. When postdocs burn out. When the brilliant person who came in glowing with curiosity leaves with a thousand-yard stare and a haunted feeling they can’t quite name. I’ve literally seen my PhD classmates go grey over the course of several years. We treat these as individual mental-health problems, when they look more like predictable consequences of a culture that asks people to amputate most of themselves to be present.
Research is genuinely hard. It involves long stretches of confusion, failure, isolation, and self-doubt — the actual experience of standing at the edge of what’s known. Doing that work without being allowed to be a full human while doing it is something close to cruel. And the parts we suppress don’t go away — they go underground, shape which questions feel safe to ask and which doubts get edited out of our discussion sections, run the show from there, and we end up calling it fate.
It seems unsurprising to me that if we are forced to fake our true nature in academic settings, that the science we produce also ends up being less honest - and reproducibility crisis ensues. Honest humans and honest science may be more entangled than the culture lets on.
I’d be curious how others on this forum hold this:
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Personal: What part of yourself have you most felt the need to hide in your academic life? The faith, the doubt, the grief, the politics, the body, the hope, the weirdness?
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Cultural: Why is the performance of disembodied objectivity still the implicit norm, when most of us privately know it’s a fiction? What keeps it locked in?
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Constructive: What would it look like — concretely, structurally — to build research spaces where people can show up with their whole humanity intact? Where curiosity is celebrated and difference is welcome, rather than tolerated only when it doesn’t disrupt the optics?
I ask partly because I’m trying — modestly — to build small spaces like this. Two retreats in September come at this question from different angles:
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Honest Science Workshop (Sept 20–27) — a research conference where you give your talk as the actual person doing the research, with the doubts and motivations included
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Work Alive Retreat (Sept 27 – Oct 4) — work alongside other humans being humans, in a setting where you don’t have to leave parts of yourself outside the door
Details for both in the Events post here - early bird closed May 31, but for this group we’re happy to extend it until June 15
But the events are just one small attempt. The question is much bigger — and I’d genuinely love to hear how others here are living with it, working around it, or finding pockets where it isn’t so.
-Pavel