It’s good to reflect sometimes.
I myself am feeling a bit dull lately. I’m working so hard at both my place of work and for the party that I forget that life has more to offer than communist propaganda spreading lol. I need to go out and touch grass more often. Today, for example, started at 6 and ended at 23 after cleaning, working, cooking and having a meeting with the party. Currently decompressing with wine and Harry Styles.
How about you guys?
Remember that the media is doing this on purpose. Previously, it did the same with Covid. Before that it was something else. Some time before that it was the housing crisis. Before that it was terrorism. It’s constant and purposeful. Try not to let it get you.
What’s the paper, like journalism or a school assignment? The blank page is your worst enemy. Write whatever you can for ten minutes. It will be rubbish. That’s fine. You can edit it later. Once you’ve written for ten minutes, two things happen. One, no more blank page. Two, ‘just another five minutes, while I finish this point’ and before you know it, you’ve done a days work.
We all feel like this! There’s two options. Stay quiet and occasionally nod, and everyone assumes you know more than them. Or ask questions. I do both, depending on who I’m talking to. If you do lots of the nodding, over time, when you ask the question, you make the other person feel like they don’t know something—why would this genius who usually just nods along ask something now, unless I’ve been unclear or made a mistake? Use responsibly your power of being known as the one who knows everything.
There’s a knack to asking questions without making it look like you know nothing at all. I’m sure it’s just a few specifics that you don’t know about. In which case, ask very specific questions and people will assume that you know the broader picture. Or ask to make something clearer. With both ways of asking questions, your interlocutor will usually give enough context for you to get what’s going on. And you make them feel that they’ve had a constructive conversation, because most people like to show off what they know.
I’m doing a PhD so it would be a research paper, presumably in a journal. There’s no requirement to write anything yet, as we’re (me, my supervisor and another postgrad student under my supervisor) are all sort of working on this. The work at the moment is mostly on figuring out the problem still. Thing is, the other student is in their final year and so there’s a natural experience gap which makes it harder for me to contribute as they can do stuff faster and better than me. That ties in to the “I feel stupid” thing because they’re already learnt all this stuff. The plus side is that he does like to explain stuff as, as you say - it reassures him that he knows it (nicer way of saying showing off)
As for the news media, yeah I remember all the way back to Kosovo - that was the first act of international terrorism by the US I can recall clearly, but of course, I was a kid and didn’t understand the politics so it was just easy to accept whatever the news said. Since I’ve become a communist it’s so much harder to deal with this stuff.
Nice one! PhDs aren’t great for mental health. Keep active, eat healthily, and drink water so that you don’t compound the effects!
Have you come across Pat Thomson’s website? https://patthomson.net/ Loads of advice about writing your PhD and your first article, plus links to other blogs, etc.
She wrote two good books with Barbara Kamler, too. Detox Your Writing: Strategies for Doctoral Researchers and Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals: Strategies for Getting Published. These are both broad enough to cover most disciplines, but they might be more helpful for some disciplines than others. The second one has great advice for forming an academic identity and writing ‘tiny texts’ (abstracts written in such a way that they also do much of the heavy lifting for the first full draft).
I get that, about the news, and I experienced something similar. It got easier for me, after a while, as I started to see that the front story doesn’t matter so much. The real problem is capitalism, and it’s been the most lethal threat to us almost since it’s inception. So whatever the story in the cycle, it’s just a distraction, and not much more dangerous than the subject of the previous story. It’ll (almost) all be fixed with revolution.
Yeah, my problems are actually being compounded by distance - I’m working remotely, and I have kind f a bad lifestyle, I’m not active enough, not eating terribly, but probably a bit too much, etc.
But I actually have some experience with writing - my MSc was pure research so I had a reasonably lengthy thesis. Obviously nothing as long as for a doctorate but still, I feel I have more practice than most STEM folks as I actually came from more of a humanities background before switching. So many STEM folks are… awful at communicating lol. Cheers for the link though, I will check it out. :)
As for news - rationally I know that the media is constructed in a certain way, that I have to ignore the sensationalism, and all that. But it’s one thing to know and another to grok. That bit’s hard.