In meat space I don’t do anything science related professionally. I wish I did. And this post is a request for employment advice. My situation seems difficult and hopefully there’s a solution. I’ve few ideas of my own for reasons I’ll explain.
What I’m doing.
Right now I’m doing janitorial work for a large auto shop. I started doing janitorial work at a medical facility while I figured out what to do with myself. That turned into figuring out my mental health which took longer than I expected, and maybe I still need what I’m doing but I want to start thinking. It’s a good job. No complaints there. There’s a tired part of me willing to just do this until I fall apart. I am in my late 40’s.
What I used to do.
Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s I worked as an undergraduate research technician. I went from entomology, to ecology and evolutionary biology, to plant genetics (actually epigenetics). I got my name into a couple of papers and even some electron microscope images into the journal Science. Things seemed promising.
But something happened in graduate school. I encountered technical problems and while my work was good, I was less efficient than I needed to be. In retrospect I was spiraling into depression and didn’t see it. I also got diagnosed with ADHD (which I knew about but haven’t fully figured out) and tourette’s syndrome (TS). I faced a choice, do I figure this out while attempting to finish a PhD or not? Given how hard it can be to do that I decided to finish with a Master’s degree in cell and molecular biology and do technical work. But this was the late 2000’s.
The financial crisis at the time made it impossible for me to land more than a couple of interviews. And I couldn’t stay unemployed for long. I decided that since I was able to do teaching assistant work I’d work on a teaching degree while working as a substitute teacher. What I got was worse depression, new PTSD learned helplessness, and anhedonia. I broke.
During this time I also became a huge brain science nerd while I figured out what the tourette’s syndrome was all about. I think I’ve done pretty good there but nothing is on paper. No track record. I went to attempt mental health technician and then just health technician and I wasn’t compatible with that. That was when the health institution I was working for offered me a janitorial position since I was struggling and willing to work otherwise. That was about 6-7 years ago.
What I want to do, and some complications.
Part of me misses the technical work. But I have almost 2 decades without using my degree. That’s a pretty big hole and I don’t know what I could do to get a chance to see how my skills are. A part of me is anxiety ridden about the possibility from previous experience. It seems like academia is out, but other than remembering that lots of those jobs were supposed to be stepping stones for others to get ahead in an academic career I don’t know how to approach it or if I want to. Private industry is similar. I feel like something would be less likely there with the gap in using my education.
Other than technical work, I don’t know. I’ve been buried in understanding why I’m the way I am with mental health and don’t know what to think about. This is complicated by part of my issue being severe life long PTSD and social anxiety and avoidance. It’s hard enough to think about and work on basic socializing. In retrospect the social avoidance hurt me professionally more than I realized. And the source of the avoidance is very early childhood combined with some social neglect. I’m working on it but I’ve little but pain in my group feelings. I can go through the motions but that only gets you so far with creative thoughts.
I do like to talk about brain science. Posting about it is hard because it’s a different social act than meat space interaction that we have an older evolutionary relationship with than symbolic marks. The process of doing videos would be as uncomfortable, and I’d need a new skill set. My recent posts are things that have been in my head for awhile that I wanted to get out, thoughts chasing each other around. There are positive feelings there but they coexist with the ever present negativity.
And I’m basically an educated amateur and would have to be able to show what I’ve learned. I could become a source of information about what terms and diagnoses mean for people somehow. There has to be a need for what I know and could learn more with direction, but for the emotional recoiling from society.
My big passion was origin of life research and I don’t think that such a thing is possible now. Those molecular biology posts were some things I am passionate about and I wanted to get all of that out of my head. Those thoughts have been chasing each other around in my head for years but given the state of academic science and the nation and my age it seems daunting.
I think that’s it for now. I’m not sure what sort of professional I should talk to or what to consider. My next step is to look at what is in demand at the state employment sites. If I think of anything else to add I will update this post. Otherwise I’ve got some ideas about a post about how feelings, emotions, and consciousness works using the amygdala as an anchor.
Hi it’s Al
Your post was really heartbreaking. You are one of the smartest people I know. And I know a lot of smart people. I’m so sorry you haven’t yet found an appropriate outlet for your talents.
I’m sure there is a niche there for you though. Your writing is amazing. Perhaps submit to some journals? Get your name known.
I also think it would be great if you could do some videos. So people can see the real you and just how interesting and well informed you are. You could do your own channel. Although I think you deserve a bigger audience, so maybe try for a guest spot on a suitable science channel.
But whatever happens I wish you good luck; and I am sure you will find your spot eventually. It’s a waste of your talents otherwise.
stay in janitorial. clearly it gives you enough mental free space to think about the big important things in life. write non-fiction books on these subjects; shop em around or self-publish as u please. i lean toward self-publishing as lower personal investment on every level – time, money, social energy, and losses if it doesn’t do well.
if i could afford the instability of my old line of work as a security guard (extremely disposable contract employees), i’d much rather do that than my brain-sucking day job.
Work is necessary to live. So one works.
It is really very nice to work at something one likes doing; best if you love doing what you do.
Alas, not for me, that.
—
It may pay you to investigate volunteering for work specifically in areas where you would like to get paid to work, so you could actually do what you like, and best of all, you’d actually be able to do something you like, even if unpaid.
(Sorry to be so vague, but you know, entirely different milieus. Best wishes)
Your history is strangely akin to my own. I was also an undergraduate research assistant in the early ’00s at university. I got my name in a couple papers (including first author in a paper in Environmental Science & Technology, which I’m still proud of – I worked hard for that), and was on course for a career in academia. But leaving home (moving across the country, actually) and dealing with all kinds of life changes in grad school, in addition to academia not being what I expected (both the specifics of my research project/group/supervisor, and the larger experience) left me depressed and alone. I didn’t even finish a Masters. While I was still a grad student, I was able to convince a university to hire me to actually teach a couple introductory courses a year (to some pretty large classes…my smallest class was 80 people, but 150+ was more usual), and they allowed me to continue doing so even after I failed to graduate, so that was lucky…but without a graduate degree, my career prospects as a university instructor were limited. So I also decided to study education – to become a high school teacher. I moved back home and attempted a teaching degree at the institution where I did my undergrad. And it broke me (learned helplessness is the exact the way I described my situation to my psychologist at the time). Worsening depression and what I eventually (MANY years later) realized is probably undiagnosed ASD (I still think the term “Aspergers syndrome” has value, but I know people have moved away from it) resulted in me having a terrible time of it, and I just stopped going to class, back in January of 2012.
Turns out, I don’t learn…or teach…the way everybody else does – I couldn’t understand why nobody valued my perspective (born of actual teaching experience), while my instructors (and peers) couldn’t understand why I was so…different. I loved teaching university students, and I was good at it, but I never had to convince anyone I was a good teacher. I just…taught, and the students learned. I got better with experience, but even in my very first class, in the end-of-term student review, I ended up in the 80th percentile for all teaching personnel (tenured/tenure-track professors and sessional instructors) at my university. I did find that using my existing methods in high school was still pretty effective much of the time (even accounting for the difference in age of a couple years between freshman university students, and the kids I was student-teaching as an education student), and I think I would have been a pretty good high school teacher in time, but none of my professors, and few of my supervising teachers thought my real-world experience had any value. Also, I could tell that the actual coursework was total BS. Everybody knew it, but my fellow students were better at going through the motions and behaving the right way, than I was. And failure to understand where the disconnect was exacerbated my existing major depressive disorder…and the rest is history.
So I took some time to get my mental health in order (not to mention get my chronic pain under control – that was also a situational factor that contributed to my failure), and to try to start over, and find something else to do, something that engaged my brain, but was also fulfilling, and in demand (both now, and in the future). I also worked at Costco, stocking shelves. Gotta pay the bills, but I will confess, I really did not like working at there (but it was better than the alternatives, at least). I eventually settled on the healthcare field, and after looking at my options, decided (based on a few factors which are not really relevant here) to study x-ray technology. I did a couple outstanding prerequisites, applied, and spent a couple years on a wait list…until that wait list was discarded by the powers-that-be, and a new way of determining who gets the chance to access a pretty in-demand career was instituted. And in the spring of 2020, I was accepted into the program.
Getting in turned out to be fairly trivial…the new barrier to entry was the Casper test (which is an online situational judgment test, looking at how you’d respond to potential workplace ethical dilemmas, and how you’d interact with the parties involved therein, to determine suitability for the nature of healthcare work), and managed to convince the graders that I had really great people skills (they say you can’t study for these kinds of tests, but you really can, and learning to give the kind of answers they expect is not difficult). And then with Covid raging, ~90% of the first year of a two-year program (where we learned a lot of theory and the basics of technique) was conducted online – every week, we had ~20 hours of online classes, and just 2 or 3 hours of in-person instruction. These hands-on labs included some actual physics stuff, practical medical stuff (most of which is also learned by first-year nursing students), and a whole lot of setting up fake x-ray exams, practising on our lab partners (that was the main part). Every couple weeks, a new region of the body to x-ray, new things to memorize. I enjoyed the labs. But the online learning of all the other stuff made that year…FAR BETTER for me. As long as I kept up with the material (SO MUCH ANATOMY, and consider that Anatomy and Physiology was one of the prerequisites, so they just assumed you knew all that stuff), I was golden. School is school, and mental health challenges aside, I’m usually good at it, especially when I don’t actually have to fit in with other people in a classroom setting.
Of course, doing well in the theory stuff couldn’t prepare me for a full year of practical learning, spending 40 hours a week at 3 different regional hospitals (4 consecutive months at each), actually working with technologists (few of whom had any interest in teaching students), or the tricky social dynamics at play in this environment. And I did fail a practicum term. But I didn’t give up. I learned coping mechanisms, especially how to mimic the kinds of behaviours that were expected of x-ray students (the main lesson: don’t treat it like school, where the purpose is actually achieving a complete, synthesized understanding of the subject matter…treat it like politics, where the purpose is proving like you’re just like the voters…in this case, voters are technologists and clinical instructors who can tank your whole career before it even starts). I also used the supports that were available to me (including accessibility services) to the fullest extent possible. And at 42 years old, in December 2023, I FINALLY graduated (by the skin of my teeth). And I’ve been working for basically a full year now (alas, still no permanent, full-time work yet, but it’s early days – I’ve averaged a bit more than 20 hours a week so far, working shifts at multiple clinics, which is not great, but better than nothing). Better yet, I love my job, and I’m good at it. It also pays well (not THAT well, but it’s enough). And I feel like I’m really making people’s lives better.
So if there’s a lesson there, it’s…perseverance? Or not rushing into anything if you don’t have to? Umm…maybe not letting other people tell you what you’re able to do (trust me, when I re-enrolled after failing, I was STRONGLY discouraged from trying again)? But the lesson I wish I’d learned before I started on this new path…figure out why things didn’t work before.
Before I started on this path towards an actual, hopefully successful career, I just assumed that I wasn’t working hard enough…that I was not mentally strong enough to push through the hard times I encountered. I thought that I was just…weak. Smart, but not resilient. And I did, as a byproduct of all of this, become more resilient. But that wasn’t the only thing that had sabotaged me. Ultimately, I had to embrace the ways in which being different actually work to my benefit, while learning how to pretend to be like everybody else, at least most of the time. I could be myself…without drawing attention to the differences between me, and most of my peers. Turns out, if you don’t rock the boat, most people just assume you’re “normal.” I dunno…I hope that helps. Sorry for the essay, but I thought it was necessary to show that I do understand the struggle. I’ve experienced some extremely bad times. Fortunately, I have a supportive family, and that mitigated my situation somewhat. But I legitimately thought, for a few years, that there was something wrong with me, and was at a loss for how to fix it. Giving up was always an option, and I was so close, so many times, to accepting that I had wasted my potential and could not ever have a chance at finding actual life satisfaction. So…good luck. And don’t let the bastards get you down.
If it comforts you any, my own employment history is even more of a mess, as is my own lack of options. In fact, I likely have no formal work history at all.
I graduated with a degree in CS way back in the early 2000s. No one would hire me. I didn’t get so much as a single interview (two fewer than you got, apparently), or even a “we regret to inform you” letter or anything; my resume mailings sank without a ripple.
I was able to get on disability with an autism diagnosis (it’s unclear how accurate that actually is, as I don’t think psychiatry has advanced as much beyond the phrenology stage as they like to think it has, but I definitely do have problems relating to neurotypical people, especially men, and handling stress). It pays a pittance — it’s increasingly difficult to cover even the most basic of expenses on it. I’m forced to live in small places on the outskirts of small cities, because nowhere else is the rent affordable. I also cannot afford a car, nor profligate taxi use, and the places with affordable rent are all two-plus kilometer hikes away from amenities with no public transit options. So I get a fair bit of exercise, but also my ability to stock up is strongly dependent on the weather being cooperative, which especially at this time of the year it often isn’t.
And the possibilities for employment of any kind got more dismal with every passing year. First of all, entry level jobs don’t generally pay very well, and accepting any would substantially increase my expenses (grooming supplies, likely wardrobe too, and definitely transportation). It would have to pay well up into the five figures before I’d be doing as badly as I am now ability-to-cover-expenses-wise while also having much less free time, and probably in the lower six figures before it was actually worth the reduction in free time.
Meanwhile what I hear about is people who don’t have an “in” (good ol’ boys network or etc.), whatever their credentials, juggling two to three part-time McJobs and getting nowhere near that much. I don’t see how I could even survive attempting that. I’d lose my current income stream, the replacement one would be only marginally better, my expenses would have gone up, and … well, I said I don’t do well with stress, and McJobs tend to be stressful.
Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t mind having more opportunity to contribute in some way to society, but by “contribute” I definitely do not mean “be exploited and treated little better than as disposable slave labor”. I’ve no interest at all in “contributing” by making the Musks of the world richer while my own circumstances get, along most axes, worse. If I could do something meaningful that benefited an actual community, maybe. Even then, though, I’d be burning my one line of retreat if anything went wrong. I’ve no idea how to restart the disability payments if (when) I lost this hypothetical job. I don’t know the system well, the parent who set it up for me in the first place is dead, and if I’d have to re-prove my eligibility I’d be fucked regardless, because they took away everyone’s family doctors here in order to enrich … somebody, not sure who, so no doctor’s note, no eligibility, no money, and sometime before the following spring, no me, because the climate where I live is absolutely not survivable without shelter.
Oh, did I mention I am extremely bad at dealing with bureaucracy in any form? Even fairly basic tasks like getting ID renewed or getting any place’s tech support to fix something quickly that is indisputably broken and whose brokenness is indisputably their rather than my fault. I get heel-dragging and don’t know the magic words to circumvent that and get straight to the actual fixing-it bit, or I get told that my address or some other piece of PII doesn’t match their file and they can’t help me, or some other thing goes wrong, or at best they keep sending me back and forth for this document and that document and some other document, maybe between the study and the phone or maybe between my home and their office four kilometers from it. The most recent, laughable failure of this sort had a guy on the phone saying my address didn’t match their records, when I had called them to do a change of address. Of course I gave them the old one, but that also didn’t match their records, despite I’d been receiving snail-mail from them for years at that very address. They said they couldn’t help me until I told them the address they were seeing displayed on their computer screens, and apparently there must have been a typo or something at their end, and I would not be able to get any help from them until I guessed their typo. Ridiculous. I should think that giving them an address that matches all but one character of what they’re looking at ought to convince them that I’m me, which is why I’m fairly sure that a lot of this stuff happens in bad faith. The system is clearly at least two-tiered, probably three, with an easy tier for middle class people and those even better off, a middling tier for people with my kind of socioeconomic status but who knows the right incantations, and then a bottommost tier for people like, well, me.
I’m given to understand that having a job would also entail a lot more of this bureaucratic crap, from employer forms of various kinds to much more complicated taxes to fill out.
What, then, about self-employment? Etsy or eBay or something as outlet, make my own hours, no corporate bureaucracy to deal with … and at the mercy of a big tech platform that’s unaccountable and unappealable if they decide they don’t like you (and they will, everyone does eventually), as well as fickle markets. Jumping from a meagre but stable income to a very unpredictable income strikes me as a tactically bad move if I don’t want to emerge feet-first from a snowbank one spring day after a too-long period of not raking enough in. And again there’s no way to maintain a safe line of retreat for if that happens or if I just can’t hack it. The only options are to stand pat or go all in and pray not to end up with 2358J all in different suits, which my luck more or less guarantees is what will happen.
Volunteering wouldn’t increase my income, but it wouldn’t jeopardize it either … and of course is also not an option, for transportation reasons alone. No income increase = no ability to go more often than maybe once a week to much of anything and also no ability to guarantee attendance at any kind of regular date or time, since my ability to get there will be very much dependent on cooperative weather. Plus I don’t think there’s a great abundance of things to volunteer for in the little shitpot towns I can afford to live somewhat near, populations generally under 20,000. If there are they certainly aren’t advertising anywhere that I see it.
This also means my social life is essentially nonexistent. It’s pretty much impossible to “put yourself out there” when there’s nowhere to go that’s worth going, other than trips to the store for supplies, and you can’t go anywhere very often or very reliably anyway.
As far as I can tell, my life is a dead end, career-wise. I elicited no interest whatsoever from the one field I got credentialed in, no entry-level unskilled job could plausibly pay enough or be stable enough to be a step up rather than a step down in my personal food-and-shelter security, and I sure as hell can’t afford to go back to school on this money as I can barely afford to neither-freeze-nor-starve-while-doing-nothing-else on it. The world has deemed me a defective, or at least surplus, labor unit fit only for the most exploitative forms of work anyway, and I’d rather wither away quietly here on a disability pension than become a slave in one of Bezos’s warehouses or spend the rest of my days peeing into bottles in one of his delivery vans.
I’m stuck like this until either a miracle or a disaster happens. A miracle would include somehow gaining, without any real opportunities to interact with people, whatever social skills would make me able to do the schmoozing and other bullshit that is apparently a requirement now to get any kind of non-exploitative job (and then I risk becoming the exploiter, which I also don’t want) or to deal effectively with bureaucracies and get them to actually serve you in whatever capacity each one is supposed/obligated to do instead of finding whatever means and excuses they can to dodge doing so or drag their heels endlessly. Or, perhaps I’d just come into a whole bunch of money out of nowhere, enough that it would take the rest of my life to draw it all down with a modest increase in quality of life, such as having ready access to motorized transportation or being able to live somewhere “happening”. Or, miracle of miracles, a socialist revolution after which people are no longer valued only to the extent that they either are a billionaire or are being exploited to enrich a billionaire.
Much more likely of course is that my status quo changes due to a disaster. Disability gets cut, or suddenly decides I’m not eligible. Or I’m the victim of a violent crime. Fascists take over and send me to the camps for my views and for my uselessness. Climate catastrophe — the digs people like me can afford aren’t very safe during a flood, or a wildfire, or a tornado. Or, quick and clean unless I’m unlucky enough to survive the first 20 minutes, the bombs fall.
So, Brony, bad as your circumstances sound, they could actually be a whole lot worse. You seem to have good enough social skills to be able to branch-swing in the job-o-sphere without running out of money and thus expiring, and maybe have a better environment regarding amenities and social opportunities. I don’t see any obvious pathway, not dependent on something fortunate basically falling into our laps, for either of us to advance our socioeconomic prospects, but your current position seems a bit better than mine. And lest you think “but at least mine is stable”, I’m not so sanguine. I could be one bad tiff with the landlord for any reason, one piece of bad legislation by a Tory government, one bad decision by a bureaucrat somewhere who at best doesn’t give a shit about people like me and at worst actively hates me for some reason, or even one bad storm away from being on borrowed time and already functionally dead (nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs and await the end, without my PC and external hard drives). Even failing that, the cost of living has been creeping up faster than my income, and sooner or later I’ll draw down what savings I have (from when the cost of living was significantly lower than it is now) and then I’ll have months left before eviction and perhaps, depending on the time of year when that happens, a few more left to live after that. I wouldn’t really call that “stable”. And meanwhile I have to carefully weigh every “big” purchase (even a couple hundred bucks): when that dark day comes will I regret not having been able to keep a roof over my head for 1 more month, as I might have if I’d left that money in the bank?
I am not in a position most people would envy, I don’t think.
I don’t know about submitting to journals. I don’t know that anything I’ve posted is journal worthy.
As for videos, it would be painful. The writing was painful, is painful. If the thoughts weren’t so obsessive I don’t know that I would have posted what I did. I feel drained now that they are out.
I don’t know how to fix that other than working on basic in-person socializing first. And that is difficult because no one else I know is as obsessed with that stuff as I.
It’s very lonely working as a janitor and being obsessed with molecules and meat computers though. I yearn to be able to share the subject in socializing and I yearn to do something else.
Then there’s the bad ankle (a kid landed on it in an inflatable castle right before puberty). If that gets worse I’ll have to find something else. It’s mostly old scar tissue from twists but it is painful. Bearable because it is the sort of thing where I have to use it as normally as possible but I’m still not sure what might happen with it.
Also I wouldn’t know what to publish, I’m not sure what the value of what I’ve written is.
Now if I can only figure out what I want to do. When my choices have come out so bad it makes choosing painful too.
Our stories do seem similar. More coursework seems daunting but if I had a goal…I’m not sure what to do with what I’ve put my mind towards over the last decade. For better or worse I’ve been finding places where the political language in society is wrong when it comes to what brains are and how they work. That’s why I have a faint hope of something that involves making brain science real and useful to people who don’t know what’s going on with all the acronyms and such. Otherwise my efforts have involved taking harmful language from abusive people when it comes to political language about brains and behavior.
Hopefully I’ll run into a job that looks good.
I can’t say that I get comfort from someone being in a more difficult position than I. And your situation is very difficult. I also have issues relating to the average person. I take some comfort in the fact that “neurotypical” people just don’t have categories describing them yet. Medicine just starts where society complains and the complaints are skewed. They forgot about us in a positive sense.
I worry about falling into something exploitative too. My current job isn’t that but it will grind me down physically eventually. I need something else.
I sympathize with dealing with bureaucracy. I manage with a notebook and a clearly labeled next thing to do.
It’s premature to consider volunteering unless I choose that to socialize. I need a goal first.
I hope you find something. And I hope the culture around you improves.
Thank you.