Sphinx

Remarkably, the results of a search for “ancient history” on the jobs.ac.uk website currently include an advert for a Demi Chef de Parti. I cannot help but interpret this as a personal Sign. Back when I had finished my final undergraduate exams, and for various reasons was pretty sure that I’d messed things up to a degree that would preclude any hope of funding for a PhD, I had to think seriously about what I should do instead, and came to the conclusion that I would really like to be some sort of chef. Of course, I had no relevant qualifications or experience, so it was fortunate that the PhD funding did turn up after all, but it’s a salutary reminder of how rarely in my life I have had any sort of career plan.

No plan? Aha! But what about academia? you cry. Well, kinda. Do I really look like a guy with a plan? Perhaps I do, but it’s an illusion. I’ve basically always done what I’ve been told by someone to do, combined with what seemed like a good idea at a given moment. I just chase ideas like a dog chasing cars; I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I properly caught one. So to speak. Put another way: there’s a thin line between interdisciplinarity and flexibility, and incoherent dilettantism; between breadth of interests and a butterfly mind; between a significant (relatively speaking) profile on social media, and a tendency to get distracted by Twitter memes. If it makes any sort of sense in retrospect, it’s accidental.

And you may say to yourself: this is not my beautiful job. And you may ask yourself: how did I get here? And you may say to your Head of Department: I actually have no idea what I’m doing.

It is, of course, a sign of considerable privilege to be able to admit this without fear of consequences (apart from making my HoD nervous, I guess; sorry, Barbara). It’s a sign of even greater privilege – not least, but not only, the fact that things were really substantially easier for early career people twenty-five years ago, in terms of what one had to have achieved to be a serious candidate for a proper job – that I could have aimlessly wandered through academic life and still ended up here. It may well be a specifically Cambridge or Oxbridge issue, in two ways: the lack of helpful career role models when I was a PhD student (other than: stay in Cambridge; if not, move away and try to get back as soon as possible), and the fact that this didn’t really matter, at least back then.

This isn’t intended as a self-pitying lament so much as a self-indulgent wallow. It’s not primarily a work/life-balance thing; not that that’s perfect – my music practice is slipping, again, and I’ve been meaning to get round to another lot of brewing for about a month and a half – but I have a good idea of what I need to do, even if I don’t ever quite manage it. No, this is about the balance within the work, and specifically within the research side of it (I’m always going to prioritise teaching and try to fit everything else into the time remaining).

In brief: (1) I take on far too much (and always have done, but the too much increasingly is too much, either because I’m older and tireder and less inspired so it all takes longer, or because I get more invitations to speak and write stuff than I once did); (2) I am hopeless at prioritising any of this, (i) because my default position is still to feel desperately pleased that anyone has asked me, and if I turn it down maybe I’ll never be asked again, (ii) because I tend to feel obligated and guilty at upsetting people’s plans, (iii) because I am too easily attracted to others’ suggestions and can immediately think of things I could perhaps talk/write about (the whole chasing cars and being distracted by shiny objects thing) and (iv) I haven’t the faintest idea what other system of priorities I should be using.

Of course, perhaps no one does, but they are simply more focused and thorough, and sensible enough not to try to do everything. At least sometimes, I wonder whether I would be a better ancient historian if I wasn’t also determined to do all the classical reception stuff (or vice versa), and a better academic if I didn’t also do all the social media and blogging and attempting to write more general works for other audiences despite clearly being too abstract and pretentious to do it very well (vice versa probably not so applicable – though it is true that I have various ideas for general essays that have either ended up as half-arsed, largely ignored blog posts instead, or are still just sitting in my ‘future ideas’ file, long past their sell-by dates).

All this has come up this week because of a specific instance of “it’s all too much, can I just not?” that I won’t bore you with, leading into reflections on how to try to get on top of things, leading to this sense of impasse. I don’t have any particular ambition, now that I’m pretty well resigned to postponing the novel until after retirement. There are books I’d quite like to write – but are they the books I ought to be writing, and am capable of writing? How can I know, or decide? Am I trying to carve out a distinctive and coherent intellectual reputation, or should I be – or should I just carry on chasing after random shiny things and just hope it all turns out okay? If I respond to invitations, rather than trying to work out what I really want to do, I do at least have the reassurance that someone else thinks it’s a good idea…

What I really want to do at the moment is brew some imperial stout and try making kimchi for the first time. Sadly jobs.ac.uk isn’t showing anything very relevant there.