The Busy Mind
How Academia Teaches Us to Avoid Ourselves
A few summers ago, I told everyone, including myself, that I was in focus mode.
The plan sounded simple enough. Step away from distractions. Rest. Think. Write the things I had been carrying around for years but never seemed to get to.
What actually happened was something else.
I turned three months of supposed freedom into one of the most productive—and most exhausting—periods of my career.
I woke up early every day. I structured my days with the kind of detail usually reserved for seasons with looming deadlines. I wrote, revised, finished overdue projects, accepted speaking invitations I could have declined, and responded to emails almost as soon as they arrived.
From the outside, it looked like momentum. I was building my platform. But inside, it felt more like acceleration without a clear sense of direction.
About halfway through, my wife asked me something simple, almost offhand, but it stayed with me.
Why are you in such a rush?
I gave a version of the academic answer at first. Something about time being limited, about catching up, about trying to make use of the space while I had it, about how the expectations are different for people like us. But even as I said it, the list of excuses didn’t really feel true.
Because the truth was harder to name.
Slowing down had started to feel uncomfortable. Not because I didn’t want rest, but because rest had begun to feel like exposure.
Exposure that deep down, I was afraid.
The Quiet Function of Overwork
There is a familiar way we describe academic life that focuses on its demands.
And those demands are real. Teaching, writing, mentoring, service. Each dimension carries weight. Most of us are doing more than one person’s share of work at any given time, and there is nothing abstract about the exhaustion that follows.
But that is only part of what is going on.
Underneath the visible obligations, there is often another layer of activity that does not come from the syllabus or the tenure clock. It comes from somewhere less visible. A kind of internal pressure to keep moving, even when nothing external is asking for it.
It shows up in small, almost automatic ways. Checking email before you’ve fully sat up in bed. Telling yourself you’ll rest after “just one more thing,” which rarely turns out to be one thing. Opening your laptop on weekends without having decided to, almost as if your hands moved before your mind caught up.
Even on sabbatical, or during the summer when many professors are not teaching, there is often a quiet instinct to keep the day “useful,” as if usefulness itself had become the default condition of being awake. None of this feels dramatic in the moment. It feels normal. Responsible. Professional, even.
But over time, you start to notice what that kind of rhythm does to your interior life.
Because when everything is always slightly filled, there is very little room for anything else to surface. And when something does try to surface—fatigue that is not just physical exhaustion, or a kind of low grade, background sadness, or a sense that you are not entirely sure what you are chasing and whether it will be worthwhile—it tends to get met with more work, again and again.
More emails. Another draft. Another conference.
More platform building. A small task that keeps the system humming. Keeps you relevant. Keeps you growing and reaching your “potential.”
There were days during those summer months when I would finish a stretch of writing, feel a brief sense of completion, and immediately look for what came next. Not because anything was due at that very moment, but because stopping felt oddly unstable, insecure. Even the act of having an open afternoon began to register as something that needed to be filled in with more stuff to do.
And when I did stop, even briefly, what came forward was not clarity.
It was everything that had been sitting just outside the frame.
The quiet loneliness that doesn’t announce itself when you are teaching or traveling or answering students’ questions. The uncertainty that doesn’t always attach itself to one decision, but to the larger shape of a life built around deadlines and recognition and external validation. The small grief of realizing how much of your attention has been spent elsewhere, even when you were physically present.
The sadness of being able to count on one hand how often someone asks with genuine curiosity, “How are you feeling today?” instead of “What are you working on?”
There were also more ordinary things I didn’t expect to notice so sharply. How rarely I had unstructured conversations that weren’t about work. How often my day was organized around someone else’s request, serving another family member, sacrificing myself to make another person happy. How quickly silence started to feel like something I should fix.
None of this was overwhelming on its own.
That’s not really how it works.
It comes in layers, and it becomes visible mostly in contrast. The contrast between motion and stillness, between what you are doing and what you notice when you stop doing it.
And so, like most people in this rhythm, I kept moving and performing and showing up for everyone except myself.
Not because I didn’t know how to stop.
But because stopping had begun to feel like something I didn’t quite know how to occupy.
The Promise That Doesn’t Arrive
There is a quiet assumption that runs through academic life, even when no one says it directly.
If you keep going—one more article, one more talk, one more presentation, one more promotion—something will eventually settle. The work will accumulate into arrival. The restlessness will ease. The anxiety will lessen. The next milestone will finally feel like a place you can stand.
Most of us learn, slowly, that this doesn’t quite happen.
Recognition comes. Titles change. Invitations appear. Work circulates. You get the email, the notice, the line on your CV that marks a shift you once worked toward. And for a moment, it does feel like something has moved. It feels like you have finally arrived at that corner office.
But the movement underneath often remains the same.
There is a kind of Monday morning after every milestone that no one really prepares you for. You go back to your desk. You open your laptop. There are still emails. Still drafts. Still conferences to attend. Still things that need attention. The external marker has changed, but the internal pace hasn’t.
And that is where the deeper questions begin to take on a different weight.
Because if arrival keeps arriving without actually arriving, then it raises a different possibility, a more tragic reckoning—the structure of external work itself has been doing more internal work than we realized.
It wasn’t just producing more output. It was organizing and reorganizing how we relate to ourselves, shaping our self-concept.
I remember noticing this most clearly in small, unremarkable moments.
Sitting at my desk after a piece was finally submitted, expecting a kind of internal exhale that didn’t come. Or finishing something I had been carrying for months and realizing that, within a day or two, my attention had already moved on to what still wasn’t done, the next project, the next big idea.
Nothing was wrong in any obvious sense.
Work was getting done. Life continued. But there was a subtle mismatch between accomplishment and ambition. And once you start to notice that gap, it becomes difficult not to ask a different kind of question.
What would it look like to pursue meaningful work without that background urgency?
Not to leave ambition behind. Not to step away from scholarship. Not to deny the urge to leave a legacy. But to stay inside one’s purpose without being organized primarily by the need to outrun something that remains unnamed—let’s call it ego.
I don’t think most of us answer that question honestly. I certainly didn’t.
And perhaps this is because it tends to show up indirectly at first. In conversations that feel slightly more honest than usual. In stretches of work where attention feels less fractured. In moments of pause that don’t immediately collapse into the next task.
But even those moments are enough to suggest that another way of being in this work might exist at all.
Not outside it.
Not after it.
But inside it. Differently.
Less driven by urgency. More anchored in attention. More present. Less dependent on constant validation to feel secure in one’s own trajectory.
I find myself returning to that possibility more often now. Not as an answer to the underlying sense of anxiety, but as something I am still trying to understand in practice.
And it is from that question—still unfinished, still unfolding—that the next essay in this series will begin.
Toward What Comes Next
In the final essay, I turn directly toward that possibility.
What does it looks like to live and work in a space where validation is no longer the primary force organizing one’s academic life.
Not withdrawal. Not reduced ambition. Not a quieter version of the same patterns. Not even less output.
But something closer to grounded ambition, where excellence still matters, but no longer has to be held together by urgency or self-abandonment or the push to perform more.
That is the next question.
And it is where I go from here.
Until then.
Becoming Full,
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