“One day it all seemed so silly to me, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. The symbolic system collapsed. You write a good paper, and it’s rejected because your reviewer was having a bad day. You’re a perfect fit for a job, and you lose to the committee chair’s godson. Once you have a job it doesn’t get better—do you know how many people are passed over for tenure because someone somewhere once felt they were rude at a party? I mean, what’s the fucking point? I couldn’t keep up the charade, but also I didn’t see the value in anything else, so I just put a stop to it all. I could not care
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