Quit job, feel awful

[Kickintheteeth]

Until last night I had a permanent post teaching a Humanities subject at a Russell Group university. There were lots of things I didn’t like about my job but plenty that I did like too. Unfortunately it’s a substantial commute away and I’ve had two children. My husband’s job, meanwhile, has become more demanding and he’s not in a position to be the ‘drop it all and get to school/nursery when the kids are sick’ parent. We have no family nearby. Childcare costs for the younger child are ruinous where we live, and so is the cost of the commute. I thought about it and thought about it and I could not see a way of making it work. I couldn’t see how I could have anything like a satisfactory home life or a satisfying work life at any time in the next 10 years. For the next two years at least we’d be running a loss during term time as childcare and travel costs would be greater than salary. Also, I hate commuting and I have completely lost confidence in my research. Just don’t believe in it, or myself, anymore. So I quit. And I’m so, so upset. That’s it. My career gone and a lot of my identity with it. Friendships with respected colleagues, gone. I feel like it’s an insane thing to do but the alternative is working my socks off, sticking the kids in wraparound care and with god knows who if they’re unwell, missing a lot of breakfasts and bedtimes, and travelling for minimum 4 hours a day, all for net £2k a year and a constant awareness that I’m underperforming at work.

Don’t really know what I want from this. Anyone done the same and made it back into academia? Anyone understand? Have I done something insane?

Just a massive handhold to you.

No, you haven't done something insane. What you describe is unlivable - it would chip and chip away at you until you broke altogether. What you've done is to keep your powder dry for another day.

There is a reason too that you lost faith in your research at the same time as having a young family and being tired beyond belief. It would honestly have been a wonder if you could not have questioned your work in that context.

There are lots of roles around academic research now that are home-based, if you feel eventually that you want something different. The generational retirement of covid (everyone who could get out got out) is still filtering through. The jobs will be there when you are ready.

And lastly I totally hear you on the kids. The costs of childcare make modern families so fragile. One bad family bug and you are set so far behind it seems impossible ever to catch up. Eventually you can't live like that any more and then one parent has to pay the cost. I could save some warm words for the system that means it is almost universally still the woman in mixed sex couples though!

I was sitting here struggling to sleep having recently left a job for the same reasons. We have 3 very young kids and one of them needs a more present parent right now. I have an offer of a 3 day a week role which means a huge pay decrease but works in every way for my family, or another job of the same old type that pays much more but I don't think I can sustain. Reading your post has helped me to make my mind up.

You can't thrive inside a dysfunctional system. The very best of luck to you and your family, but after the initial panic subsides I don't think you will regret what has clearly been an agonised over and careful decision.

Oh and don't rush into anything new! As someone who suffers life-long anxiety about having a grand plan, it's all too easy to do.

You deserve a break and some happy time with your family. A few months will make no difference - don't even look at the job pages and leave anything else till 2023!

You don't need to panic. If you do decide to stay working, there are lots of jobs outside academia, often ones that will allow you more flexibility in work hours, enough pay to properly cover the costs of childcare, or often both. Many of my friends have left, and built much better lives outside.

How many opportunities of course depends on what area you're in (of study and geographically), but there will still be many.

Travelling for FOUR HOURS a day? You were insane but to have quit sooner!

Our childcare was more than my salary alone for 2 years but it is a shared cost that enabled us both to work

Within 3 years it was very comfortable and by 45 I was a very high earning individual- something that I wouldn't have been able to do if I had left work

We will both be retired easily by 60 , something not possible if we both didn't work. Pension contributions are a very important part of working! Sometime you need to see the long game.

I respect everyones choices to work or not but it does frustrate me that you talk about net £2k a year- it is also net whatever your DHs salary is.

Did you DH offer to quit work, or look how you could both reduce hours maybe?

Thank you so much for the supportive messages and the reminder that there can and will be something else on the other side of (what will hopefully be) a short career break.
@JennyForeigner you make some good points about research and a young family. It doesn’t help that the period in between maternity leaves was filled almost entirely with COVID and its fallout. I don’t remember when I last had a full working day to read and write. I look back at the research I used to do with bafflement, frankly. It feels like somebody else wrote it. Perhaps when I’m not sleep deprived and addled from negotiating with two little children it will come back.
I’m glad my dilemma has helped you reach clarity over your decision too. It feels daunting to lose any income right now, but equally children are little for such a short time and they are so dependent on parents that sometimes time is a more important resource for them than anything we could buy. What you said about your child needing you more right now struck a chord with me too — my eldest is in the same position. After school club would not be a happy experience for him at all, and I was dreading having to explain to him that he’s need to stay for it.

@OverTheRubicon Thank you. This is my hope as at the moment I don’t see how I can possibly get back into academia in a sustainable way. I had always thought it would be an easy job to combine with child rearing, and of course the vacations do offer a lot of flexibility for school holidays, but I was at the mercy of a pretty unbending and irrational centralised timetabling system that made the two or three weeks before term miserably stressful as we waited for the finalised timetable to drop and then scrambled to work out childcare.

@HaveringWavering Ha, yes, it’s a big part of the decision. Most days it’s closer to 5 hours and it was breaking me. Before kids I could handle it for up to 4 days a week but now the idea that even a 10-5 teaching day might well mean not seeing the children all day except for a perfunctory kiss before running for the 7 am train is too much.

@WhyCantNameLastMoreThanDay I’m glad things have worked out well for you. In my case it’s about a lot more than just the money, and yes, in the past my husband did flex his hours to minimise childcare costs but as living costs have risen we need every penny of his (more £/h) income.

have to say it is not something I would have done (or did, indeed) - I get it - but I agree with PP that a job needs to be seen as part of a long game - pensions, sabbaticals etc (though all that is diminishing as we speak). The thing is - children are young for quite a short period of time and you just have to find workarounds. I would be surprised if you got back into academia easily - unless you have a very niche and needed specialism. There are layoffs everywhere and always new PhDs coming up the ranks.

also, a lot of academics I know who have to cope with this use the workplace nursery in the early years. I know not everywhere has them though.

Workplace nurseries unfortunately just don't work for many academics. The OP's commute is not that unusual at my university; you can hardly drag small children two hours to put them in a nursery. This is one of the major reasons why I didn't have children, the logistics just seemed insurmountable if I wanted to stay in my job.

I'm sorry you had to make this decision, OP, but I'd put money on you, in two years' time, being relieved that you got the hell out of academia, since it's only going to get worse. I'm only staying because I have a mortgage to pay. I feel exactly the same as you about my research, and from line managing academics, I know we're not the only ones. The last few years have really taken a toll.

I'm so sorry to read this OP. It's a perfectly sensible decision, even if it's heartbreaking.

We have two small DC in FT childcare, both work FT (both academics albeit with very different roles) and have an hour's commute and it's bloody tough.

Take a beat to lick your wounds.

What did you like about the job? The research? Teaching? Collaborating? Solo working? Try and find something small you can do to keep that skill ticking over (e.g. tutoring?) and then when the kids are a bit bigger have another think.

I had a career change into academia just before I had my DC and it's such a hard time of life to build momentum in anything

@wordleaddict Believe me, I’m not kidding myself that I’ll get back into academia! I’m in a massively overpopulated field and my research isn’t very fashionable. That’s one of the things that makes leaving bearable, actually: the work I really liked doing wasn’t particularly conducive to winning big grants so the university actively discouraged it (that’s in spite of all my publications being in the top journals for my field and rated highly in REF exercises).
On workplace nurseries: as @GCAcademic says, I can’t very well haul my baby on a minimum four hour round trip every day. And even if I did, my university’s nursery doesn’t actually cover the full teaching day. And who would be my emergency contact for my older child if he needed to come home from school? My husband can’t do it reliably and there is no one else. I can’t be two hours away!
Look, I get it, other people make it work. I am hugely impressed by them and I half wish I was one of them. If we had family support near home, if my husband’s job were more flexible at the moment, if the commute was even an hour rather than two each way, I think I would at least try to get past this. But here we are. It feels like the only practical choice. I’m just sad and anxious for the future.

Eh, don’t sweat it too much OP. You’ve made the decision, now celebrate it. You get to be with your children while they’re small, and be the flexible and stablising support that helps families so much.

You can work again in future, and actually may want to set aside half a day each week to work on your career, whether that’s study, or volunteering, or private tutoring on zoom (huge market, £40/hr) or just googling things to keep an eye on future career opportunities.

I have relatives who work in academia and I well know how when you are in that world it seems like nothing outside is as worthy of respect. But once you’re outside of that world, it is a lot less impressive. You can get a much better job in a couple of years, trust me.

Draw a line under this chapter, take some time to grieve the end of an era (and celebrate the end of everything annoying about it such as commute and timetables), then accept that the academia chapter has served its purpose in your life and you deserve more.

I think there are few jobs where work is as key to someone's identity as is the case in academia. When you're in it, it's hard to imagine yourself as a whole person outside of it. But people do find themselves functioning very happily after academia; in fact, of the people I know who left (some of them, like you, reluctantly and because of circumstances), all of them are happier now.

If you haven't already read about this, google "academia is a cult".

I was no-where near as successful as you OP, but I just quit academia for commercial research. If you have any qual/quant/project management skills there's a lot of jobs about. Most of my friends in Humanities have headed into UX or CX, rather than "research". But it pays OK, and it's a field where your skills are useful and people understand that knowing stuff is hard. And you can do it mostly at home.

There is another way.

Take a sabbatical. Apply for some stuff. Get scared. Take another sabbatical. Then keep applying. You'll get there.

Just popping on to say that you're going to be just fine OP, it's all going to be. Just take a minute.

As one door closes, another one opens and all that...

Thank you for posting this. I'm on the brink of making a similar decision. I'm on a 'prestigious' (yuck) fixed term fellowship, with a while left, but with young children and no family around, and my DH earning more, and my colleagues without children able to attend every event, no matter when or where while I miss one thing after another because I don't have childcare... How do I make this work? And my kids are happy where we are, and academic life looks increasingly stressful and unrewarding. Your lifestyle is exactly what's expected of me, and I'm just not sure it's worth it. Academia definitely is a bit cultish - you're in or out, you're 'us' (better, smarter, elite) or 'them' (stupid, ignorant, failures). I'm afraid to leave, but the veil is lifting. You've done a really brave thing and, honestly, I think it's the right decision.

It doesn’t matter how great your job or your pension is. You can't do a four hour commute every day for years. You have been brave and done a difficult thing, but one that might have been forced on you in the future anyway, due to the unsustainable commute. I was happier after I left academia, even though I had desperately wanted to succeed at it. I succeeded at something else instead.

I think you've done by far the best thing for you and your family. I did the 4 hour commute for 25 years, as did DH. I am one of the many covid-era-flee-ers, and left in 2021 at the age of 57. I am very fortunate that I am on the tale-end of the people with the more generous final salary pension which allows me to take it at 60. In the meantime I am surviving on a widow's pension of half DH's pension (his terminal illness and death in 2020, a bare couple of years after his retirement at 68 was a big element in my saying 'enough').

I was really scared about the academia-as-identity thing, and couldn't really imagine who I'd be outside it. The answer is - just the same. I really don't mind not being 'Professor X' any more. The relief at not having to apply for grants for projects I don't want to run, or try to juggle the demands of academic publishers against REF criteria is immense. (Let alone all the horrors of the managerial university culture). I'm working on a book for a mainstream publisher but with no sense of urgency. I'm just waiting to see what I want to do next.

I am very pessimistic about the future of the British university system, especially the humanities. I'm trying very hard to steer my undergraduate son in a different direction (he's seen enough of how its deteriorated over the last few decades). I think you've made a very wise decision, and that you'll find plenty of directions to take your skills when you want to re-enter employment.

I faced a similar decision, and went to the extreme of taking zero hour contract work for 3 years. On bad days, I mourned the professional me, and all the best bits of my career-but even so, I had a secret feeling of relief that I could nip home, be there etc. Fast forwards to now, my children are teens (still need me though!!) I restarted in a completely different field, at the bottom, but I now have found myself in a position where I can probably (haven't asked yet!) negotiate 1 day a week study leave to complete a postgrad qualification, which in 3 years will see me in my dream role. A very long wait, but for me, I know I will have the work-life harmony I crave. I think you are very brave, and very wise. If I had my time again, I would never have gone back to work before my younger children had started school. That time lost to commuting and long hours is time I could have been at home with them. They are little for such a short time, enjoy your lovely family, and give yourself time to disentangle from your former career.☕

I’m so sorry to hear you feel this way about your research too, @GCAcademic . I know a lot of colleagues feel exhausted by the teaching and administrative elements of the job, but one assumes (hopes, really) that the research continues to be a passion. It’s very hard when that goes, for whatever reason. I’ve felt a fraud for a while because the kind of projects I’ve been pushed toward discussing leave me completely cold. The idea of giving you weekend and vacation time with the children to plug away at grant applications I don’t even believe in was a grim thought. It’s very sad to think that in fact a lot of people feel just as trapped by the R as by the T and A.

Thank you for this kind and thoughtful reply @JenniferBarkley . Working through the things I loved about the job is good advice. Sorry to hear you also have a tough commute. For what it’s worth, I think you’re incredible for sticking at it. You’re spot on about the difficulty with building momentum. My career was just getting going — more admin responsibility, a head of steam on my book — when I got pregnant with my first. Intense first trimester fatigue and nausea coincided with a crushing reaching load and the book went sideways and getting back into it was a huge struggle. I enormously admire, and am completely mystified by, those academics who write books on mat leave, incidentally. Maybe their babies nap like all the books say they should?!

This is such an inspiringly positive and uncomplicated answer! It’s so good to be reminded that only academics revere academia. Online tutoring is a brilliant idea, thank you. And yes, the loss of status amongst my friends (all academics, pretty much) is a hard pill to swallow. I guess I just have to trust that as the dust settles the best ones will stick around and I’ll have a healthier perspective than currently.

@leafinthewind Good to hear it worked out so well for you. I was hoping for some good stories about life after quitting. What are UX and CX, though?! I have never heard these terms. (I’m ok with leaving research behind. I loved it for a time but in the end I found the solitude and the lack of short term, achievable goals very challenging. Everyone complains about it, often for good reason, but I often enjoyed the practical, collaborative parts of administration more comfortable).

@Cathy31 Yup. I too have missed event after event because no childcare. I’ve been repeatedly embarrassed by the fact that department meetings have been organised on my non working days since going part time. Often those meetings were ones I was required for because of my admin role — I was supposed to be running several. So I scrambled about organising emergency childcare, pouring more money into my hateful commute. It’s very hard, and I’m sorry this is your reality too. I’m so glad if this has been helpful, and I hope if you do come to make a similar decision further down the line you’ll feel more confident in it reading some of the great replies I’ve had here.

Hold on there, it'll get better. I quit two years ago after spending 5 years commuting internationally and finally realising the career was never going to happen. The first year was horrendous. I struggled to get hired in a new industry and ended up in a bad job. I'd lost all my friends and hobbies to the commute and hours, so once the research job was gone my whole identity collapsed. I felt a complete failure.

Fast forward, I've found a much better job now that amazingly has all the things I loved about academia and very little of the shit. I stop work at 17.30, walk home, do sport and have friends. I hadn't realised how much energy the stress about the future sucked. I feel alive for the first time in years! I suspect the research job had actually been giving me a slow burn breakdown. It's really a remarkably similar effect to watching my mum go on HRT