Yeah,” he replied morosely, “empathy is really hot right now.”
(If you’re still not convinced, the way you can really tell something is horribly wrong is that grad students find PhD Comics darkly funny, not just dark.)
I’ve been low-key worried about this for a while, but it boiled over recently when Eve offhandedly mentioned a department survey that showed over half of her classmates struggling with depression or anxiety.2
Over half! These are some of the smartest people in their field, who I’m confident would thrive in any normally-supportive (or supportive-at-all) work environment. Instead, they’re riddled with anxiety and depression because they’ve been convinced to tie up their entire identity in being one of the lucky 10%3 that lands a tenure-track research job, then hung out to dry by the gatekeepers they probably thought would help them.
How the hell do people think this is reasonable?