"Burnout"

To me, academia—and research in particular—has always felt somewhat akin to sport.

It's about achieving a lot and doing it well, with constant, objective comparisons to competitors through metrics such as the number of publications per year, citations, journal rankings and impact factors. That alone would be exhausting enough.

But I have a talent for complicating things for myself.

Unlike many academics, who remain in a relatively stable niche, I keep changing fields and evolving, throwing myself into new territories about which I often know almost nothing at the outset of a project. I started with metaphor studies, then moved into critical discourse analysis. From there I explored visual studies grounded in metaphor and ideology, then the ideology and pragmatics of humour, narrative, narrative criminology and narrative identity. More recently, I have engaged with ideas from Derrida's hauntology, transgenerational conflicts and emerging social representations in contexts of marginality, deviance and crime. Who knows what will come next? If I had to pick a single statistic that really represents me, it would be this: across my fifty Scopus-indexed articles there is an unusually high diversity of journals and domains. I rarely see this level of dispersion, even among academics with a hundred or more publications, whose work often circulates within a familiar cluster of journals with known editors and close colleagues.

As a result, I work intensely and I am always trying to outperform the previous year.

This year, on more than one occasion, I have found myself feeling completely empty—simultaneously driven by the desire to achieve more and paralysed by the physical and cognitive effort that “doing more” actually requires. Some call this burnout. Perhaps it is. But the academic market is so competitive for people like me, and my desire to achieve a lot and to do it well is so strong, that most of the time I don't even feel the fatigue.

Or I pretend not to.

If I had to choose a metaphor, it would probably be a marathon. Except in this marathon, we don't know where the finish line is, how many kilometres are left, or even whether everyone is actually running on foot.