Feeling like a total failure
in Psychology ·
Samuel Phillips2 said:Sometimes all this research feels like a total scam. All the charts are just rigged to make my boss look good. Honestly, there’s barely any difference between five of his papers—just moving empty data from one pile to another. One study uses 57% ethanol, the next uses 53%. It's all just filler to pad a resume.
I honestly don't think your interest in this field is ever coming back. In fact, things might actually get worse. If you don't make some kind of pivot—or if that change doesn't just happen to you naturally, which would be a lucky break—there's a huge chance you're going to spend your whole life feeling unsatisfied and frustrated. And that's being optimistic, really. It could go way deeper than that, like slipping into depression and all that heavy stuff. Since you still feel a spark for art, that's a good thing, because it means there's still a tiny bit of hope left that you'll find fulfillment one day. But if you lose that hope? Things could get ugly fast. You might lose interest in art too, and then you're facing what feels like a dead end. And let me tell you, those feelings that come with that are pure hell.
Science isn't meant to be a routine grind, and you hit the nail on the head with that. Especially not working at the CIA. You either have to find some niche where you can actually settle into a rhythm—maybe a junior professorship at some obscure liberal arts college where the tenure requirements aren't soul-crushing, assuming anything like that even exists, or maybe joining a team where someone else is the big visionary driving the emotional engine while you just handle the support work—or you have to make a radical change. Either way, what's keeping you stuck right now is basically the weight of everyone's expectations. And it's not just other people's expectations (because if it were just them, you wouldn't be struggling this much), it's your own, too. You want the stuff that comes with meeting those expectations, like prestige and respect. Those two things are constantly fighting each other on a scale, and it's really just a matter of which side wins out. What I truly hope for is that you don't end up stuck right in the middle, paralyzed by the balance...