Academic Addiction

When external validation is your oxygen

From my new book manuscript:

“The central principle of this book is that academia functions on an addictive logic of external validation, and that logic, over time, disables you from recognizing your own inherent value, accurately evaluating your own skills, and remembering any values that depart from those that academia authorizes.”

There are a lot of resources on leaving academia these days, and many of them are very good.

But none of them address what, to me, is the core issue: that anyone who succeeds in any capacity in academia becomes addicted, to a greater or lesser degree, to the external validation of academic gatekeepers (search committees, tenure committees, journal editors, conference organizers, etc.) and this addiction makes it virtually impossible to imagine leaving academia and losing your “supply.”

Tomasz Glowacki articulates this dynamic in an essay in Science Careers:

When I eventually started a Ph.D. program, my survival mechanisms masqueraded as professional virtues. Cutthroat competition for grants and the race for first authorship didn’t feel daunting—they felt like home. For years, I told myself that in science, this hypercompetitiveness simply came with the territory. But, for me, the truth was more complex.

I was ravenous for prestige, lunging at every award, every travel grant, and every fellowship as if they were life rafts. Each “congratulations” email provided a hit of dopamine and a fleeting, digital proof that I was finally outrunning my origins. I wasn’t just building a career; I craved validation from a system that, much like my father, was never quite satisfied. (Glowacki 2026 Science Careers).

Like all addict logic, this one gets rationalized in countless ways:

• “any other kind of work just isn’t as meaningful”

• “I’m just passionate about my research”

• “I still have another book to write”

• “I could never abandon the students'“

• “The classroom is where I can make the greatest difference”

• “I have to defend the discipline against political attacks”

• “I’ve just been asked to direct a new Center they’re starting on campus”

• etc.

But in reality, these are all cover for a desperate dependence on specific markers of legitimacy, without which the scholar cannot function.

Etienne Toussaint describes this in a recent post, “The Achievement Trap.”

I know this because I have lived it.

There were stretches of my career when I checked citation counts and follower counts more often than I read for pleasure. There were moments when an unanswered invitation felt like a missed opportunity, something I could not decline. There were times when I noticed envy rising in me at a colleague’s success, colleagues whose work I admired, whose friendship I valued.

Something in me had mistaken their flourishing for my diminishment.

None of this made me a bad person. It made me a person inside a particular kind of system.

He observes that “academic life can slowly turn achievement into a form of emotional survival.”

I lived it as well. That’s how I know it so well.

While inside the addiction, no work outside a university setting is valid because no work outside a university setting validates those achievements to which you’ve devoted your life: writing, publishing, grant-getting, conferencing, teaching, awards.

As in any cultural system, foundational beliefs are rarely overtly stated. Generally while you are inside the academic system, all of this is invisible. It’s the very air you breathe. They only emerge clearly at the margins, especially when they are transgressed. The primary margin/transgression in the case of academia is departure.

Once outside, you can’t unsee it. “I can’t believe I lived like that,” leavers say, after enough time has passed.

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The problem is the process of leaving. When you first try to depart you’re utterly unequipped to function outside because you have likely lost any sense of self, any barometer of value outside those that can be listed on a CV. Cut off from the supply of validation, you can only imagine this departure as not just “failure,” but existential annihilation. In Toussaint’s list of eight characteristics of the “achievement trap,” #8 stands out: “Fear of invisibility: The thought of disappearing from the conversation feels existentially threatening.” The shift to a different career evades rational thought. It becomes a totalizing crisis of identity, and the emotional turmoil - until such point as it is confronted and managed - is paralyzing.

(Retirement, although a kind of departure, does not function in this way. Of course, professors are famously bad at retiring, and many try and stick around long past their expiration date. But retirement is an “honorable” departure that, especially when accompanied by the “emeritus” title, leaves your central status and legibility intact. It also leaves intact your ability to continue to seek accolades if you desire.)

Toussaint describes one colleague’s oddly muted response after getting tenure:

. . . a kind of emptiness underneath all of the celebration.

They had spent years pouring themselves into their academic work. And now, after finally achieving the recognition they had craved for so long, the question became: what comes next . . .

What prize? What review? What invitation?

That’s why, while on the one hand, in the realm of things to be addicted to, overachievement in the pursuit of academic accolades might seem far from the worst, it nevertheless causes genuine harm.

First off, it is one of the primary things that makes academia so horribly toxic - toxic at its most elite levels because there you’re inhaling the purest stuff with the highest egomaniacal hyper-competitive stakes. Toxic at the lower levels because of the endless ignominious, humiliating scramble to secure your paltry supply.

It’s also what makes academics so relentlessly individualistic and — less obviously perhaps — so painfully shut off from non-achievement elements of human life, things like emotions and bodies and the compassion that arises from inhabiting these fully.

And finally now, when the system-wide collapse is forcing so many thousands of PhDs to leave under duress, more than any other single thing, it is this addictive logic that leaves them floundering and panicked. Even when you do find another job, without confronting the original desperation for validation that fueled the academic project in the first place, you’ll just repeat it in the next thing. Glowacki again:

I thought I was solving the problem by taking academic validation and prestige out of the picture. At first it seemed to work. I built a solid career, progressing into management and director levels. But each promotion was, in reality, driven by a renewed need to compete. I had changed my environment, but I hadn’t changed the person who didn’t know how to exist without a battle to win.

Glowacki goes on to relate the many interventions required before he was able to finally “to decouple my self-worth from the applause of others.”

After some 16 years of working with PhD clients in their processes, and living through my own, I know that this decoupling is doable, but it is so very hard. That’s why I decided to write my new book (and start this Substack). Because all the advice in the world about writing a resume or making a LinkedIn page cannot help you if you don’t first stare in the face of what drew you to, and kept you in, this addictive environment in the first place, what made you sacrifice your own well being at the altar of external validation.

If you’d like to see my advice on leaving academia come out sooner - for you or for others -please consider subscribing! Your paid subscriptions allow me to set aside my regular work to focus on writing the new book full-time! It really will make a difference!