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?
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.