No motivation at all

[Warning12]

Can anyone relate? My university is in a terrible mess and redundancies are on their way. We’ve lost hundreds of people already through voluntary severance. I’m struggling to keep going. It all seems so pointless and things are only going to get worse when more people go. My motivation is through the floor and everyone is struggling. I’m not sure of the point in posting…Maybe any advice on strategies for how to keep going in the face of all this?

Yep, I'm in a similar boat.

The startup I work for had a funding issue in June, and there were serious worries that we'd be shutting up shop and everyone would be out of a job.

Motivation absolutely hit the floor.

The financial stuff is all sorted now and we're safe for a couple of years at least, but we're all still struggling to find the motivation again now.

It’s so difficult, isn’t it? I expect to know whether I’ll be made redundant in the next month. This has been hanging over us for two years. I almost want to go to escape it all, but that would be my career over. I’m trying to just plod my way through each day, but for some reason today is being particularly difficult. The less motivation I have, the more stressed I get.

I am finding this September really hard. I often find myself a questioning work myself after a break at summer but this is worse. there is no hope for promotion no money everything is harder/more pressurised due to lack of staff. We have had redundancies in previous years so it’s not happening currently but am reaching end of my tether with academia I think. Just wish I knew what else to do instead

I also don’t know what I would do for work if I lose my job. I’m in the humanities so there isn’t any obvious career path outside of academia. Teaching starts again in a couple of weeks and im dreading it.

It's really tough to find the motivation this year. We had a recruitment freeze announced recently and had lost 2 staff just beforehand. Won't be replaced now. It's utterly desperate. We are all burning out with having to cover vast swathes of work and term hasn't even started yet 😭

I'm not in an academic department but teach students and our work is generated by managers who want us to do more and more with less staff every year.

Student numbers are down so this recruitment freeze isn't going anywhere soon although I'm sure the VC still finds money for his pet projects and to pay his inner circle of executives.

In my department, the student numbers are up, possibly way up. We’ll see what happens between now and start of term.

It’s the marking I have no motivation for, none. I used to think of marking coursework as a conversation of sorts between and my students and a means to check my teaching. Now I think why the hell am I spending any of my time reading something an algorithm generated in 10 seconds?

On top of that, our PS team is always trying to push us to ‘improve’ our feedback with time consuming initiatives but as it’s mostly to improve our NSS scores on those questions. They don’t understand that it’s never going to achieve what they want to achieve.

Yes, second restructuring in five years, this time following a round of VS.

This sounds miserable and familiar. I'm in the US and almost lost my job a couple of years ago when they canned my department (Classics). As another rather niche humanist, I looked into online teaching in my subject and it looked very doable - I had a plan to get a really good website and advertise my services and the money looked as though it would be OK. Is that something you could consider?

I’m not sure about tutoring. There’s very little demand for humanities tutoring. I’ve looked at tutoring in academic skills, which maybe more do-able, but I doubt I could get the same
salary as I am now. I am the sole earner within the household so there’s a lot of pressure financially.

Hi all. Picture is less gloomy here but I am menopausal and flat. Our student numbers are way down but actually I feel relieved because I have less personal tutees and it'll be less work for once.

There's the alt careers Facebook page for those looking to switch. A colleague jumped from history to the civil service @Warning12 . Worth a look? She made a smart move.

@Mumteedum thanks. I’ll take a look. My challenge is that I’m tied into my current location for DCs for at least another 3 years. It’s a small city with very few jobs (lots of poverty) so I’d need to find something that lets me work remotely.

Not easy at all @Warning12 . Whenever I've thought about getting out of HE, it just seems impossible. I'm 0.8 and can't manage full time hours. 0.8 is not a fraction you can get on a job share or elsewhere. It's either FT or very part time which I can't afford. Add in needing adjustments for health reasons and I've just accepted that there are good reasons to try and keep going if I can.

Oh I hear you OP- am the breadwinner here with kids at/going to uni. Cant go live in a camper van much as I might fantasise about it.
ive looked on some of those ‘leaving academia’ groups and i cant find much beyond people promoting their coaching. I am research not teaching so guess I do have skills that would transfer. Need something over 50k

Same boat here.

My university is doing OK financially and I just flatly refuse to internalise the perceived pressure (e.g. do things better, do things sooner, give students more).

My research is heading in a really exciting direction and raking in lots of consultancy.

But, despite all this, I just can't be fucking arsed. The whole system is massive energy sap. There's no incentive to push the boundaries, do something cool, get excited. Administration processes seem there purely to hamper our work. And my colleagues mostly continue to be either downright fucking terrible (usually men behaving as academic men always have) or just completely baffling to me.

My motivation is on the floor. I go in to work as little as possible. I do the bare minimum. I'm fortunate but redundancy would be a relief in many ways.

Coaching seems to be a pyramid scheme. Eventually there will be coaching coaches...and nobody else left to coach!

I’m waiting to find out whether I’m still in a redundancy pool. I expect to be as I don’t think enough people will have taken voluntary redundancy to satisfy them. The idea of interviewing for my job fills me with fear. If I was a bit older I would have retired.

I completely know where you're coming from. I 'escaped' about two years ago (also humanities) and I'm now doing something completely different after re-training. I took a pretty significant pay cut and I'm only on a temp contract, so I'm worried about getting something else when I finish due to dire job market. But at least I did get another job and therefore now have some prospects outside academia.

Before I left, my motivation was through the floor. I was in academia for 15+ years, but it just chipped away at my sense of self-worth (because you are never good enough and your work is never enough) and I fell out of love with my subject. It just seemed pointless teaching students that weren't that interested and trying to publish research that felt like it didn't really matter. There is so much crap published now due to the requirement to churn it out (thanks REF) and the low standards (in my view) of the non-university presses (who in my field, really would publish anything). That and the 'echo chamber' of my tiny field - it's always the same people talking to each other about the same stuff and as a result the field never really moves on as @KStockHERO says. The scales had fallen from my eyes, so when my Uni offered VS in '24 I jumped at it.

I'm glad I left when I did, as it's only getting worse. But I also miss parts of it (not least my salary) and feel sad about how massively HE changed in the time I worked in it. I did love it, and my job, when I first started out, and doing my PhD was one of the happiest periods of my life!

I did some career coaching with a leaving-academia specialist, which hugely helped me realise my transferable skills and that there was life outside academia. Might be worth doing that while you figure out the next steps?

I was PS staff, and after they trebled my workload due to projects being dropped on me and posts not being backfilled, I quit. I can't match my salary elsewhere but had to prioritise my mental health in the end.

Thanks for that. Do you mind me asking roughly what the career coaching cost? It sounds useful, but money is obviously a concern if I’m going to out of a job.

I think it was around £350-£400. It was really worth it. I hesitated for a long while 'cos money and I was trying to eek out my VS payment as long as possible. But in the end I figured it was an 'investment in my future', as naff as that sounds. And it really was. It was one of a couple of things that helped turn my attitude around from 'I'm doomed and fit for nothing other than (failed) academia'.

@FlappicusSmith thank you! I’m sitting on pins waiting to hear what the university is going to do next. Realistically, they’re not going to have enough people leave voluntarily to stop the redundancy process, but I have a really small glimmer of hope that it might be OK. But then the thought of how much work is going to be done once we lose 30% of our workers makes me depressed, too.

@Warning12 it is incredibly difficult but I think you have to sometimes let things fail. So if you keep your job but the workload is untenable...the only answer is to burn yourself out or let things fail. Miss deadlines. Don't do everything they want. Go off sick.

Having ended up with a chronic illness (not down to work exactly but it sure doesn't help and God they've had a LOT out of me).... Nothing is worth it. I won't get back to how I was before.

I'm just shrugging this year. I just do not care. They have introduced a new policy that will impact our assessment period which is already tight. I just don't care. I'm not able to work extra condensed hours to get stuff done so it'll just be late and students will complain.

@Mumteedum you’re absolutely right. The only way that my place keeps going is because people are working their asses off and taking on more work. I just can’t see how this is tenable in the medium to long term.