I’m tired. Hence the long hiatus. All my writing effort has gone towards grinding out dissertation revisions. My PhD defense was supposed to be June 1, 2022. (I wrote this piece in November 2022, btw)

The project started 6 years ago, and 6 days before the defense, my advisors cancel because they finally read it and have revision comments.

What could’ve been my first fall of freedom became a season of burnout. I’m already calling this the “lost semester” to my friends.

I’ve kept some strange hours to add about 30 pages of content and 200 additional footnotes, plus read 2 articles and 2 books. The track-changes say I made 7831 grammar revisions. (and I wasn't done yet)

These additions came at a cost. I currently hate writing. Well, I currently hate doing anything, but especially writing. Which feels wrong because writing is something I want to do forever. I’ve been training my entire life to write well for the rest of it.

My favorite days in the past were the ones when I spent my morning training at the dance studio, then spent my afternoon writing and reading.

These days I don’t have favorite days. That’s not right.

Why is that? Because my academic writing doesn’t feel purposeful, and I suspect this will be only the beginning of the problem if I continue in academia.

So what’s the purpose of writing? Writing is one form of communication, so I think it’d be easier to think about if we broaden the question. Why do we communicate about anything?

Because we want to share the truth and express it beautifully. Some passages from Aquinas come to mind:

Truth means making your communication align with reality. It doesn’t matter which signs you use either: words, numbers, colors, sounds, whatever.

As you faithfully express reality, you often get the added benefit of aligning yourself with reality, too. Speak truthfully, and you make yourself more perfect. (II-II Q109 A1 A)

The opposite of truth is falsehood. Falsehood is communication that doesn’t match reality.

Sometimes we say the wrong thing unintentionally; that’s a falsehood but not a lie.

Lying is an intentional falsehood. A lie comprises both a falsehood and a deceitful will.

False words fail to communicate reality. Lying words intentionally fail to communicate reality.

Ignorance usually isn’t immoral unless you had good reason to know better. Honest mistakes happen. Lying is always bad though, no matter what signs you used to communicate the lie. (ST Q110 A1 R2)

Lying violates the purpose of communication. Lying also violates the liar by destroying their relationships. Lies condition both speaker and listener to ignore reality.

Every lie sacrifices a little bit of the self.

“Don’t lie” is about as close to a universally recognized truth as it gets, so nothing said above should be controversial. Christians and non-Christians have agreed since ancient times that truth is good and lying is bad.

So writing exists to express truth. Truth is the purpose of communication. Truth is also what the human intellect desires, so there’s a natural harmony between humans and languages. It makes sense why humans everywhere develop language.

Communication is good, even though most words uttered on any given day are meaningless. Most communication doesn’t reveal some grand reality, but that doesn’t mean the purpose is illusory.

The average conversation wastes so many words on either:

We waste so many words on matters that don’t matter. Misuse is a serious problem, but it doesn’t make language worthless.

The problem isn’t limited to personal communication, either. I suspect professional communication often suffers the same abuse.

Every career depends on communication. So if a job violates the purpose of communicating, then it violates its own foundation.

Here are some ways to misuse language:

If a career makes you do any of these, it’s forcing you to communicate for the wrong reasons. It’s parasitic; undermining the foundation its existence depends upon.

If you aren’t telling the truth about something worthwhile, then why are you talking?

And if the career violates language, it’s also going to violate the employee who’s tasked with all that worthless communication. It isn’t healthy to waste words.

There are some writing jobs that fail the purpose of communication. People make careers out of exaggerating problems, or gossiping, or filling articles with jargon.

But when we do such things, the motivation becomes extrinsic. You aren’t doing the job because it’s doing good. You’re doing the job for some other good, like money or fame.

The tasks become grinds. Purpose gets sacrificed for a salary.

Now let me reflect on my dissertation and explain why it’s burning me out. Spending months revising and editing feels like I’m violating the purpose of writing, and violating my purpose too.

My arguments aren’t lies or falsehoods. I’m writing about free will and God, so the themes aren’t trivial.

But it’s reached a point where I’m spending months answering trivial questions. This project is entering its 5th month of overtime and I haven’t learned anything substantial about my topics in that time.

I’ve mainly learned how to word my ideas so my readers won’t ask for any more citations. The bibliography has still exploded, nevertheless. It’s 10.5 pages now, every line filled.

A lot of the overtime has been responding to comments then waiting on the commenter to read my responses and respond to those responses. It’s the manuscript equivalent to a “Re: Re: Re: Re: Question?” email chain.

Except imagine the original email is 300 pages, and each reply takes weeks. It’s the most trivial yet overcomplicated thing I’ve ever done.

Writing 300 pages according to the demands of a few so you can get a PhD isn’t the same as writing because you love the subject. It’s not the same as writing for maximum effect on the reader either.

Academics think of the dissertation as the 1st step of a career, yet I already feel the career forcing me to violate the purpose of writing. And I feel myself losing purpose.

My current professional goal has me writing for 3 people on Earth. And once they approve it, it’s headed to the departmental storage closet unless I work to keep it alive through unusual means.

I’m filling out a 330 page form so I can get a certificate that gives me the right to call myself a Doctor on flight reservations.

Then (hopefully) podcasts will want me as a guest. My website will get a billion views. Supporters will buy me a year’s worth of coffee (or better yet, a year’s worth of BANG Energy). Hospitals will schedule a Zoom meeting with me and wire over four figures before the call ends.

My dissertation is operating on extrinsic motives. The process feels specially designed to make us hate writing. It becomes another grinding task as we climb the university’s corporate ladder. Yet people keep trudging through academia anyway because we dream of professional honors.

Extrinsic motivation alone will make any process agonizing, especially in the delays.

A delay that provides more time to work on your passion is a vacation. A delay that increases your workload is crunch. Vacations are great, crunch is hell.

Academia has led me into a giant project that’s becoming worthless before it’s even finished. We’ve arrived at the root of the violation and the grind.

I’m feeling like this project is violating the purpose of writing, but also violating my relationship with God.

Think about the unprofitable servant in the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14–30).

What surprises me about this story is that the bad servant didn’t lose any money; he didn’t create a loss. He just didn’t create any additional good from his talent because he hid the investment in a hole.

And the lord punishes him for letting the talent languish. The punishment is not over a loss, but over failure to grow. And the punishment is severe.

God expects a return on His investment in us. As I’ve said before, God provides us with our existence at every moment; that’s a monumental investment in us that no other being could make.

But He is a God of maximum goodness. God is perfectly good, and we are supposed to be like Him, after all. He has provided so many goods and so many opportunities to do good.

If we end up doing nothing with superabundance, that’s a moral failure. It’s a sign that we don’t really love the Good. If we did, we’d act on it.

I also think of the Parable of the Lamp (and there's four versions of it, no less: Matt 5:15–16, Mark 4:21–22, Luke 8:16–18, Luke 11:33–36).

Each of us is a lamp of God, in our own way. As visible light diffuses and illuminates everything unless something blocks it, God intends to radiate from our life and illuminate our little space in Creation.

Burying our talents means willfully blotting out a lamp lit by God, which is a great moral failure.

Refusing to use the talent God gave you is perhaps as bad as using that talent for evil. After all, “because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth.” (Rev 3:16)

I hear these words of Christ, then I look at my young career in academia, and I get concerned.

Academia isn’t the place to create maximum impact or do maximum good.

Scholarly journals don’t attract big audiences. They don’t even attract modest audiences.

Academic writing isn’t an efficient use of anyone’s talent. Lots of academic books take years to write, get a single printing run of 500 copies, then go out of print after selling them to university libraries, who often buy whatever gets pitched.

That’s the only way for the publisher to make money off books they expect no one will read.

Meanwhile, The Orthodox Snake just had its 1000th visitor, and it hasn’t really launched yet (it’s like the hotel in Ocean’s 13: “it’s a soft opening to test the place before the grand opening.”)

1000 readers off a few blog posts. I’d bet money all my published academic work combined hasn’t gotten 1000 reads.

Or compare my academic impact to my impact as a dancer. I’m in a dance film that released this past weekend. It’s a 3 hour film with 24 different casts and choreographers.

In the 5 months since my canceled defense date, every cast had their own recording day, each at different locations. The editing team completed all post-production.

Then we got a posh local movie theatre to premiere it, sold enough tickets to fill the theatre, prepared a red carpet event for all the casts, and released an extended version online.

Just a disgustingly complicated project, all done in the past 5 months.

In that same time span, I’ve had 3 conversations with my advisory board. The time-zone in academia moves so much slower than the rest of the world, it’s hard to tell the difference between progress and inertia.

Six years is a short time by academic standards, yet I’m already feeling like my talent has been rotting away in a hole.

I’m ready to drive a stake through this undying dissertation and return to the world of the living. ☦️❤️🐍

If you want to learn more about truth, falsehood, and lying, I like Edward Feser’s article here. He’s great at making philosophy easy to understand. And don't forget, I linked every passage from the Bible and Aquinas. For your own study.