March 2023 - I wrote this piece in January 2022, after submitting what I thought was the final version of my PhD dissertation. I had already been writing since January 2016. I was hopeful about the immediate future, and felt confident to launch my Medium writer profile, where this piece was originally published.

Yet I was wrong. Although I had just weathered a pretty brutal Fall 2021 semester of rapid writing & revising, the worse was yet to come. A week before my original PhD defense date in June 2023, my committee cancelled on me, requesting substantial revisions that added another 6 months and 60 pages of additional content.

I can now say those 6 months of "overtime" were the worst of the process. Hell, they're the most exhausting thing I've ever done, and I won a state championship in powerlifting once.

So now, looking back as I repost this piece to the new Systeme website, I can understand why I've been feeling undead in the 2 months since I officially became a Joint Doctor.

My mile-time has gotten 2 minutes slower and I still can't make myself fall asleep before midnight, and it's perfectly reasonable I'm having these problems after the perpetual, life-altering grind that was my dissertation process.

It's crazy how I honestly believed the PhD was done a year ago... but it wasn't, and the revisions I added later now have the word count of a small book on their own.

Take a lesson from me: sometimes it's appropriate to feel like a ghost, or a zombie. And when you do, it's probably not you that's the problem.

The problem is some external stessor. Your body is trying to tell you something along the lines of "this experience sucks and we need to escape ASAP."

It took me and my body an additional 6 months, but I am finally a Doctor, with a big 330 page book in my curriculum vitae. And the Orthodox Snake is part of my escape plan, so I don't end up repeating the experience.

I started 2022 by submitting my 273 page dissertation draft shortly before midnight… or maybe a bit after. Dissertation writing warped my sense of time. My circadian rhythm is still off because of it.

This dissertation has been going since 2016. I wrote what became the main chapter as the final paper of a Technology, Anthropology & Nihilism class I took in Spring 2016. I started the brainstorming in January, but didn’t finish the paper until August.

Why? My dad died from throat cancer that February, almost in the exact middle of my PhD journey.

The clinic didn’t discover the cancer until October 2015, incidentally the same week as both my and my dad’s birthdays. He was in Georgia while I was in Missouri.

He had to tell me over the phone. He found out on my birthday, October 21, but he couldn't bear to give me the news on my birthday so he stalled the call for a day.

Stage IV metastatic squamous cell cancer of the throat. There was nothing to do except get him on Supplementary Security Income, then get him into hospice. From the day we found out until the day of my comprehensive exams in 2017, I was living on the grace of my department.

My professors offered an unpaid leave-of-absence without consequences, but the family needed my income as a grad school research assistant. My relatives in Georgia could not support another person.

An unpaid leave and move wouldn’t have been a temporary thing. I would have ended up marooned in Appalachia, grasping for opportunity in a depressed county my dad had spent his life trying to leave behind.

I would have been physically beside him, but without the power to do anything.

The only option was a stoic commitment to the path I had started. I had spent most of my life in stoic mode. I grew up as an offensive lineman in Texas football culture, so the moral code beaten into me was a severe one:

Shut up and do your job, damn it.

Over the course of three years in college, a group of close friends eroded my stoic shield, to the point I could finally talk about my emotions, even the ones that made me vulnerable.

The vulnerability brought a few precious moments, but now it was time for the shield to go back up. Things could be worse if I left the path. Any emotions pulling me off the path would have to die.

Yet I was not alone on my trek through the wilderness. In January 2016, a few weeks before the final worst turn for my dad, I began a second life as the manager of a local dance company and their studio.

At the time, it was just a way to get free dance training without having to burn graduate stipend money. Now I recognize it as an act of Providence, as my life as a dancer would be the one to revive me, rather than my life as a scholar.

My father passed away a few weeks after I started at the dance company. His passing was earlier than expected. Two days early, to be exact.

I booked a red-eye flight out of Saint Louis for the next morning, walked over to the studio to inform the company why I was leaving, walked back home, then tried to get some class reading done before God knows when the next time I’d have the chance to study.

I was reading Peter Harrison’s The Territories of Science and Religion in the empty room of my shared rental house when I got the call from my cousin. My dad passed 15 minutes ago.

Damn it. I missed him by a day. And I only got 2 pages read.

I’ll always associate that book with my dad. Only about 5 months before, in early October 2015, weeks before the diagnosis, I presented on Harrison’s same book at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. My dad drove across the state line to meet me there and hear my paper inspired by Harrison.

We shared a hotel room. Throughout the weekend, my dad was complaining about mouth aches. It was so bad he only ate soft snacks and nutrition shakes. We didn’t realize what was going on at the time.

The presentation my dad heard is now a chapter in an expensive (egregiously overpriced) academic monograph on Christian attitudes towards technology.

I dedicated the chapter to my dad, and two college friends who accompanied me to his funeral, although academic publishing takes so long (over 2 years in this case) that he wasn’t alive to see it published.

After the call with my cousin, I sent out a large group text informing everyone my dad had passed before my flight. Friends showed up at my house 20 minutes later and kept my mind from ruminating all night. The next morning I left for my ancestral hometown for the immanent funeral.

I returned to Saint Louis 2 weeks later, but I still wasn’t really there. I was a ghost.

A girl I was talking to at the time nicknamed me "Mr Ghost 👻" (with the emoji specifically) because of my slow and emotionally detached responses throughout that Spring.

She didn’t know what had just happened, and I didn’t want to tell her. I thought it was better to ghost her than begin with “hi my dad just died from cancer and I’m juggling his estate with grad school and a dance company but I’m definitely ready for a relationship.”

My anatomy professor preemptively withdrew me from class, so I wouldn’t inevitably fail the exam which required a B+ or better to graduate. On student evaluation day that semester, in May 2016, he spoke to me in private rather than doing a formal conference:

“Look, you just went through a catastrophe. Expect your scholarly work to suck for at least the next 2 years. Come back and take the anatomy exam once you’ve got your life back.”

Except I didn’t have the luxury to suck for 2 years. I really didn’t have the luxury to suck through the past semester. Mr Ghost couldn’t fulfill my responsibilities. If I was going to live again, my life would need a few critical components, and soon.

In order to reincarnate after Mr Ghost, I knew I needed:

Any philosophers in the house might notice this list sounds exactly like the rules of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics states that a person can only achieve a good life if they have:

The big name in virtue-ethics-academia is Alasdair MacIntyre, who single-handedly made virtue fashionable again.

But virtue ethics is really the most traditional morality of them all; it’s natural for humans to make goals, build habits, and seek teachers.

MacIntyre is a historian. His books are mostly history, exploring what certain societies considered a “good life” and “virtuous habits”. MacIntyre didn’t create the system like Bentham created utilitarianism or Kant created deontology. MacIntyre just observed the same idea repeating across history.

“Virtue” and “vice” sound antiquated to Westerners now because the Enlightenment tried convincing us to abandon virtue ethics in favor of the “objective” ethics of utilitarianism or deontology.

Contrary to what you’ve probably heard in your college philosophy classes, there are other ways to make a moral code besides “do it for the greater good!” and “how would you like it if everyone did that?”

Virtue ethics never died out amongst devout religious communities, which is another reason why Enlightened secular philosophers find it embarrassing. No objective philosopher wants to root their morality in scriptural stories.

But the goal of Christianity is to imitate the virtues of Christ, so the system feels natural to devout Christians.

One of the big ideas of virtue ethics is purpose drives life. Although the fulfilled purpose exists only in the potential future, it causes actual effects now.

Your purpose provides the structure, meaning, and motive to pull your life together, even though it isn’t a reality yet.

Once you decide on the destination (your goal), you can get a pretty good idea of the path necessary to get there (the virtues). You also get a pretty good idea of who can guide you on the path, and who you need to befriend.

Without a destination, you can’t arrive anywhere. You’re just going to float aimlessly, like a ghost, doing whatever, with no serious intention.

Writing the process out makes it sound like I engaged in a neat little intellectual exercise to plan out my life. In reality, I was learning to let my stoic shielding down again so my emotions could tell me what I needed for fulfillment. It was a matter of intuition rather than intellection.

I felt a need, I reflected on the need, I acted to fulfill the need and rested in the fulfillment. Over time, things fell into the proper places, and I left my ethereal form.

The process just came naturally.

I didn’t have to do any thought experiments or moral calculus. I’m not surprised that virtue ethics claims to be part of the Natural Law. Humans throughout history have oriented their lives by a purpose, without having to think about it.

Humans like dreaming about achieving our goals by imitating our role models. We operate on habits, and we get motivated by quality time with people who understand our dreams.

I am living evidence that humans live by unstated purposes and virtues.

It’s good I didn’t approach my needs as an intellectual exercise, because fulfillment turned out to be something I would’ve never thought.

Philosophers don't do dance. These days, they don't do much of anything, so if I had gone looking for life advice from philosophers, I'd have been disappointed.

The purpose that reignited me came through my “alternate” life as a dancer, rather than my “official” life as an academic. I returned to life thanks to the Beauty of an art, not through the professional defense of Truth.

My life as a performer has an obvious purpose: create something beautiful, perform it flawlessly for the public, and give the audience something worth contemplating. The basic routine for success is obvious too: I need to be at the studio training every day I can.

There are, of course, a lot of very particular technical things I need to practice once I’m in the studio. Stuff like abdominal engagement during balances, proper tendus and dégagés, keeping proper turnout, moving with tensegrity.

None of these skills are obvious or natural. That’s why community is so important. You need excellent teachers and peers to guide you through the things that aren’t obvious or easy.

Community also makes the journey enjoyable. A 3 hour grind sounds miserable, but a 3 hour workout with friends is something I’d love to do every day.

Six years into my professional dance career and it’s still strange that my artistic life restored me to life after Mr Ghost, rather than the academic life that has driven me since kindergarten.

I’m supposed to be an academic, not an athlete, not an artist. That isn't even an identity that's been forced on me. It's the identity I wanted!

My PhD was supposed to orient the rest of my life. But if I was only an academic, I’d still be Mr Ghost today.

Disembodied minds reign over academia. The standard academic career, whether tenure-track or perpetual adjunct, doesn’t create routines for a good life.

Academia doesn’t guarantee you’ll be around like-minded people. I fear the average academic doesn’t even have a meaningful purpose.

Let me start with the routine, or lack thereof. The most jarring element in higher education, especially dissertation and book writing, is the total lack of structure.

There are months-long stretches with no accountability, because chances are high that nobody in your daily life really understands or cares about what you’re studying.

It’s mental boot camp, except you don’t get a drill sergeant to push you towards success in every task. Be your own drill sergeant or nothing gets done:

Shut up and do your job, damn it.

You can get away with any habit for quite a while, whether a virtue or vice. Either way, it’ll be years before any consequences.

Graduate students have near-total negative freedom for most of the semester, except for the last two weeks, when world-class experts scrutinize their term papers. These experts have the authority to kick you out of the program, so what you create in the 14 weeks prior better be incredible.

Everyone else is under the same pressure. The other graduate students have their own 3 or 4 papers to write, the professors have 4 courses to teach, articles to write, and papers to grade. It’s not an environment conducive to friendship.

As for purpose, academia loves (and funds) hyper-niche topics. The average tenure-chasing scholar is laser-focused on research so niche they might be the first person in history to pursue the topic.

The academic system isn’t devoid of merit. Innovation comes from hyper-niche pioneer research. Sometimes the innovation creates massive benefits for the entire world. Someone has to trail-blaze every path to discovery, and that someone is often a scholar.

But the intellectual frontier is as lonely as the Old West.

The problem with groups of pioneers is they disperse in every contrary direction, looking to blaze the trails no one else is traveling. A group of pioneers does not make a community, and we can say the same about scholars. Both the pioneer and the scholar are driven to make their own paths, paths that no one else on Earth may understand.

It shouldn’t be a surprise then that:

1) groups of scholars often cannot create meaningful community, and

2) lasting friendships between academics are rare.

Academics still idolize the friendship between J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, even though the Inklings dissolved 73 years ago. Three generations later and academia still can’t replicate the camaraderie of a dozen drunken Englishmen in a pub.

Pathetic. Call that the 2nd Replication Crisis.

It bothers me. I’ve spent so much of my life working towards a life that doesn’t give me life. Since 2016, my artistic life has been the one keeping me incarnated. My academic life has been making me ghastly.

My personal solution to survive the tribulations has been to live two lives, Hannah Montana style, letting the scholarship feed off the leftover endorphins from the daily runner’s high.

An afternoon of intense research is welcome after hours of cardio. My artistic peers still know the real me, even if they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about outside of rehearsal.

This is my last summer as a PhD student. (You sweet summer child. ~ Future Boaz) I’m truly exhausted from flipping between alter egos and grinding out academic chapters. (Just you wait, bubby.)

I know what a “respectable” career path chasing tenure will hold. I’ve already spent 6 years deviating off the respectable path. My artistic and academic lives need to integrate. My academic life needs purpose, sustainable habits, and friends or I’m ready to drop it.

In pursuit of integrating my lives, I’ve started building up a website and publishing label: The Orthodox Snake. My Medium is the newest extension of it, even though I write under my real name there because they make me.

The Orthodox Snake will tie together my artistic and scholarly lives by writing about what’s meaningful rather than what will get me tenure. My output will grow as I finish the final bureaucratic steps of the PhD.

My goal is to publish books, make videos, write articles, create online classes, and do livestreams. Be a public intellectual, and do it with some artistry.

Tenure isn’t a worthy goal for me anymore. I write for the same purpose as I dance; to reveal Beauty and Truth to anyone who cares.

I want to inspire revelations.

Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel according to my own talents.

Woe to me if I hide the Truth in a $130 monograph. ☦️❤️🐍