I’ve been meeting with third and fourth-year advisees this week, and one of them sat down wearily in a chair and said, “Well, it’s that time of the semester where I’m so tired every minute of the day.”
To which I could only say, “you know it”. Only it also feels to me like every passing fall and spring semester are more tiring than ever before at exactly the same peak moment. (Usually the week or two before Thanksgiving in the fall, somewhere around April 15 in the spring.)
I keep trying to figure it out. Why do I have so many days where I end up with a kind of buzzing in my head by the time it’s over?
I usually make a list.
Every year I’m older, and I fatigue more easily on a really basic physical and mental level. That is unquestionably part of it.
That some of the things that should get easier don’t because the knowledge and experience I already have needs constant, almost-every-day updating. I have almost never walked into a classroom to give a lecture from notes or an outline that I’ve used before. I always rewrite, reconstruct, rethink. I have literally in 30 years never reused a syllabus, not once. I always want to teach some new texts or change how I structure the work on a particular topic. I’ve never reused the same paper prompt or assignment, not once. So I get no premium from experience in that sense.
That I’m more, not less, uncertain about everything I know as time goes on. Some of the old standard paradigms I used to teach have been justifiably revised, challenged or thrown out. I’m less confident about my own prerogatives as an intellectual and teacher. I’m more worried about my understanding of my current students and have to devote a lot more energy to thinking about what they need, what they’re ready for, what they’ll hear in what I say. I wonder about what my junior colleagues think about everything, and feel fearful about whether they think of me as one of those old and stupid people who needs to call it quits. So a lot of my work takes more cognitive and emotional attention than it has, and I think would even if I were twenty years younger.
That I feel more threat in my working environment, most of it vague, subtle, just out of view. That my discipline is more threatened or derogated by malicious interests, that all the institutions of higher education are more threatened both internally and externally, that the public culture that I like to be involved with and active within has all sorts of snares and tripwires that weren’t there twenty years ago. That the world has been on a precipice for almost a decade in one way or the other. That it feels easier to trespass against others, that you can’t ever coast on automatic. All of this is creates a kind of steady background leak of energy that I can’t really manage or shut off.
That there is in an absolute sense more to do than there was and that more of it is squarely inside my work process. I am responsible for producing more reports, formal responses, evaluations, and data than I once was just as a baseline faculty member. Small fragments of work that specific staff used to do have been shaved off and dispersed to everyone without anyone auditing or taking note of the slow incremental growth of the average amount of work that everyone is tasked to accomplish. In addition, I continue to get a fairly heavy load of additional administrative and governance work of various kinds—I’m chairing again, I’m on an elected committee, etc. And I feel responsible beyond those formalities. I worry about things, I worry about people: I want things to go right, an attitude which in turn is a kind of magnetic attractor for various odd jobs and small tasks.
That interactions that seemed smoother, more cooperative, more mutualistic, more mutually transparent are now feeling more adversarial, more distant, more formal or more baffling and opaque, and this makes a lot of everyday business more fatiguing and more likely to generate thought-loops full of anxiety and self-reflection. Was that me? Am I being cranky? Intrusive? Self-important, impulsive? Is anyone else worried about that or this? Is that potentially bad thing going the way I think it’s going, and is anyone else seeing it? All of that—the fear of being just way too extra about everything, but also the fear that something bad is happening that could have been stopped.
That beyond having more work of more kinds, a given day features so many rapid-fire changes in the pace and character of specific tasks that need to be completed. There may be people for whom that is no big deal, but I’m at least adjacent to ADHD and it is intensely fatiguing for me—I can smell the cognitive rubber burning at every sharp 90’ turn during the day, and there’s always something that falls by the wayside. (Right now my AA is waiting for my updated CV and I just can’t deal with it after a zillion other teeny-tiny tasks of various kinds. Tomorrow.)
And maybe too that it’s not as if I am asking for relief from any of these sources of fatigue and hesitate to say that I’m tired because it would feel as if that’s what I wanted, that relief. Most of these drains are a consequence of my peculiar and maybe neurotic sense of duty and responsibility, or my unnecessarily time-consuming workflow. Some things come to me because I seem like a person who can help out and some things are a consequence of my egocentric intrusions where I should just sit on my hands and shut up, trust that things will turn out fine. I don’t have the sword for my own Gordian knots.
But I also suspect that people who I think are less overburdened feel really tired too. I see a few people in my life who seem genuinely indefatigable who do far more than I do along even more axes of work and life, and, well, god bless them. (I do wonder occasionally if they just collapse into a heap as soon as nobody’s looking.) But everybody else seems tired all the time as well, and I suspect their list looks like mine. So there is also the suspicion that no matter how ruthlessly you subtract for a day’s workflow, how much you declutter the to-do list, your defaults will reset to fatigue.
A very fine and welcome post - it’s good to feel not alone! Point 3 weighs on me. I started teaching many decades ago, and right out of school there’s a clear sense of “this is what people teach and this is how they teach it.” But even though, like you, I always revise syllabi and notes, and this year have two new courses, I have this demon on my shoulder whispering “that’s not how it’s done anymore.” I can try to comfort myself that students ought to have faculty from different generations, a diversity in perspective that is often overlooked. But still...
I was just saying something along these lines to an old friend today, Tim. Retirement helped on several levels, but not on all of them. The sense of the world becoming harder can’t be relieved by not working, but a lot of other things can be. (No committee work, no grading, no need to commiserate constantly and futilely.) Anyway, I know the feeling—even if my part of it is now more about aging and living in a world that is so much different than the one I remember when I was more able and excited.