Well-Read Herring

  In the final throes of 2020, my partner and I were talking about how sad we were both feeling. We attributed our low spirits in part to seasonal depression, in part to pandemic fatigue. We had been listening to Radiohead, a band whose sound is so reliably melancholy, that a data analyst recently used quantitative methods to determine the “ gloom index ” of each of their songs. In an attempt to manage the overall gloom index of our afternoon, I changed the music to something more uplifting. Understandably   perhaps, at the end of an objectively dreadful year, I could not bring myself to sit quietly with my sadness. But on my walk home that day, I wondered why our first instinct is so often to push our feelings to the side. I decided to give gloom another chance and, through my earphones, I heard Thom Yorke airily lament that he would laugh until his head came off. I am extremely late to the Radiohead party. So late that no one really remembers what music sounded like befo...

Not long after I handed in my PhD thesis, one of my aunts asked me the dreaded question: “What now?”. I remember floating the idea that I might leave academia and being met with incredulity: “After all this? But… you’ve done  all this… ”. I understood where she was coming from. For years, my family and friends had watched me grind away at a thesis that almost no one would read. Surely, they thought, once the PhD was done, the hardest would be behind me and I would finally get to experience the glitz and glamour of being a university lecturer. As anyone who has worked in research already knows, they were seriously mistaken.  Today, almost a year after I officially became Dr. Herring, I resigned from my postdoc at Ghent University. There are several reasons that motivated this decision but the main one is that I no longer enjoy the work enough to justify how demanding it is. I already felt this way during my PhD. As a grad student, I could not take a weekend off without experien...