Publish and Perish, part 23: Paradoxes

[Context: read the previous part or start at the beginning. TW: bad amateur fiction!]

It was time for another one-on-one session with Morris. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“Well, uh…” Gerald began. “Cissy recently said to me something like, ‘I can’t tell if you’re coming apart, or coming alive.’ And I don’t think I can tell either. How’s that for an answer?”

“You get full points for honesty,” Morris said. “Do you want to talk more about that? Or should we return to the loss-of-youthful-idealism theme that we were working on in our last solo session?”

“Yeah, let’s dive back into that,” said Gerald. “You had asked me to think about where my youthful optimism went. I have at least a partial answer for you — maybe even a pretty good answer.”

“When I got into this area of neglected-tropical-diseases research,” he recalled, “I was fairly naive. I sort of assumed that we didn’t have enough of these drugs because Europe and the U.S. didn’t care enough about these diseases. And while there’s some truth in that, I didn’t realize just how hard it is to develop drugs for any disease.” He paused as if moving from one slide to the next.

“On top of that, I realized that the best opportunities to complete satisfying little discrete projects were not ones that necessarily led to drug-development progress per se. So I began to focus on these adjacent projects, rather than the drug development itself, which, along with the general difficulty of doing drug development, pretty much ensured that I would never contribute real progress toward new drugs.”

He summarized: “In the end, the things I was able to do competently did not feel that important, and the thing that was really important was not something I had the vision or the courage to attempt.”

Morris listened to all of this intently. There was a moment of silence. Then Morris said, slowly, “I could be wrong . . . but to me this sounds like hard-won wisdom that you were able to gain only from working in this area for a bunch of years.”

“Yeah,” said Gerald. “I think that’s reasonable. It’s not as if I look back and go, oh geez, what an idiot I was, thinking that I could help create these great new drugs. I did the best I could at the time based on what I understood at the time.”

Gerald gave a sad smile. “But now I do know better,” he said. “So what should I do now that I know better? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself lately. Well, one of the questions.”

“Right,” said Morris. “That’s a hard question, and a vital one.” He cocked his head. “Would you say, then, that there’s a conflict, or at least a tension, between what you enjoy doing, or at least are comfortable doing, from day to day, and what seems most important to the world at large?”

“I think so,” said Gerald.

“Well, congratulations,” said Morris. “You have identified one of the fundamental paradoxes of modern life. We all have a need to enjoy our daily existence, but many of us also feel called to do something with long-term impact. Learning how to manage those competing desires is tricky, and individual-specific, and may in some cases take a lifetime — but being cognizant of the paradox, and explicitly acknowledging it, is a hugely significant first step.”

“You know,” said Gerald, “I think you expressed that well, and it reminds me of something else that’s been rattling around in my head lately. I’ve been asking, ‘Whom, beyond oneself, does one serve?’ And I think of myself, and probably everyone, as having at least two circles of service. There’s an inner circle of family members, close friends, students you teach directly, et cetera. And then there’s an outer circle of people we don’t directly interact with, but who might nonetheless be influenced by us — for example, if we write a textbook that is used by people at another school.”

Morris continued to listen intently. Gerald continued speaking.

“I think there’s a tension — similar to what you were just describing — between serving our inner circle and serving the outer circle. All of us owe a lot to our inner circle, but many of us also want to have an influence beyond that — an influence that ripples out into the outer circle. But it’s hard to simultaneously serve both well. The more time you spend caring for your own child, who is obviously in your inner circle and who obviously deserves that from you, the less time you have to do something great for the world at large. And vice versa. I think.”

“Right again, Gerald,” Morris said. “That is, for sure, another key paradox that is absolutely worth trying to solve for yourself, to the extent that it is solvable.” He formed a wry expression. “We should be able to get to the bottom of it in another one hundred to two hundred sessions. Three hundred at most.”

Gerald snorted. “I thought that a tenured professorship was the most stable job on earth,” he said, “but Morris, that crown might actually be yours.”

[Update: the story continues with part 24.]