"Depression, Anxiety, and Contingency"

"I have more than one friend who’s been on the faculty market for several years already and found this hiring season’s meager tenure-track openings to be profoundly depressing. We are trained and even incentivized to identify ourselves with a series of entities -- departments, institutions, disciplines, the profession -- that motivate us with the increasingly distant possibility (not even a promise!) of a commitment made in return. The loss of that vision for the future is often devastating to Ph.D.’s...

Many observers suggest that academics should be able to move on quickly from such disappointments because we “should have known” when we started graduate school that the odds of success were bad and getting worse. That refrain -- that we knew or should have known -- implies that those who have reached the end of this particular road aren’t entitled to feel surprise or loss or grief.

Failure -- whatever its cause, even if it is structural -- is imagined as a punishment for not being smart enough or tough enough or wise enough to succeed, or for having tried to succeed at all.

I wonder whom that explanation satisfies."
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/957-depression-anxiety-and-contingency?cid=VTEVPMSED1