Why I left academia and neuroscience
Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.
I didn’t want to write a Substack post about why I left my cushy and successful academic career. I certainly didn’t rage quit, and I don’t want to contribute to all of the anti-academia hate that is published on social media.
But here I am writing this Substack post.
I’m writing this because so many people ask me why I left. I don’t want to be disrespectful or ignore them. I understand that they’re asking out of curiosity, or maybe because they are looking for some inspiration or motivation. But on the other hand, my answers have been getting terser and less meaningful, because I don’t feel like explaining the same spiel every few weeks. So if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you asked me the question and I just sent you this link.
So here goes.
I was a successful PhD student, a successful postdoc, and a successful faculty member. I had lots of publications and grants, I had colleagues and collaborators in many countries on several continents. I wrote empirical papers, reviews, tutorials, a well-known textbook on neuroscience signal processing and statistics, and got drunk with many people at many conferences in many cities. Below is a screenshot of my Google scholar page, so you can evaluate for yourself if I was successful.
I was a tenured associate professor at the Donders Institute in the Netherlands, which is a world-class neuroscience research center. I had a lab and funding and respect, and I was on the glide path to becoming full professor.
And then I quit.
There is no single reason why I left. There were lots of reasons, and not any one of them was strong enough to have made me quit on its own. Also, I want to be clear that I am not raging against the academic machine. I very truly super duper really a lot believe in academia, and I believe that our modern, relatively peaceful, and prosperous society is continually a mere two generations away from utter collapse into barbarism if all academia and higher education suddenly ceased.
There are two collections of reasons why I quit, and I will discuss them both below. The collections overlap quite a bit, because I have never managed to make a strong distinction between my personal and professional lives, and my work-life balance has always been, and will always be, shit.
Professional reasons
As I wrote above, I don’t want to hate on academia. But the fact is that the incentive structures are pushing academia in the wrong direction. There’s too much focus on producing “products” like PhD theses and publications, and not enough focus on expanding the boundaries of human knowledge and wisdom. Funding agencies claim they want to fund novel and innovative research, but will only fund predictable incremental research from already well-funded labs. Excelling in academia is more about following an extremely narrow path that no one defined but everyone follows, and it’s up or out.
Intellectual stimulation is one of my top life values. I used to get that from academia, but by the time I was faculty, the job became almost entirely devoid of intellectual stimulation. I didn’t have enough long stretches of time for deep thinking and research, and most of my conversations with my colleagues were not actually about science, but about the business and the industry of science, like practicalities of coordinating shared lab usage, talking about what grants were coming out, department politics, policies and committees, and general complaints. To be clear, I have no problem with any of those discussions, and I understand that there are practical matters of science that just need to be discussed. I actually enjoyed sitting in meetings when we had a problem and developed a solution.
But I had more and deeper intellectual stimulation as a PhD student and postdoc than as faculty. I increasingly felt like a manager, not a scientist.
Also: It is my opinion that neuroscience has stagnated over the past one or two decades. It might be possible to get empirical data that confirm or disconfirm that claim, but I don’t really care; that is my feeling, and I have talked to several colleagues in neuroscience who feel the same way. When I joined the neuroscience community in the early aughts, it was a very exciting time. There were new papers coming out with new ideas, new findings, new ways of thinking about the brain. To be honest, I thought that the field of cognitive neuroscience was not very good and not very rigorous, but I also thought that it was very new and just needed some time to develop and mature into a more rigorous and precise science.
But I don’t think that’s happened. Instead, I see papers and research projects now that could have been done 15 years ago. People are talking about the same experiment designs, the same findings, the same analyses, as what they talked about when I was a PhD student. I promise, I mean no disrespect to any individual PhD student, but I feel like I’ve been having the same conversations about the same research for 20 years. Like there hasn’t been any meaningful progress. When someone tells me that their current paper is based on some work that I did in 2005, I should be flattered, but I’m just a little bit depressed that after 20 years there still hasn’t been enough progress to make decades-old low-quality hanging-fruit research obsolete.
I’m sure people will disagree with my lack of optimism, and point to all the amazing new genetic and optical techniques that neuroscience has developed. I was initially extremely enthusiastic about optogenetics and optical imaging — indeed, I switched research fields to do this kind of work. But in the end, the findings and the conclusions have been the same as what we’ve known for decades. The only difference is that the techniques and visualizations have gotten more colorful.
Conclusions: (1) My ascent up the academic hierarchy was successful career-wise but proffered no personal meaning or satisfaction; (2) My field is spinning wheels with new data and new publications without new findings or conclusions.
Personal reasons
When I was 37 years old, the Dutch government announced that they were increasing the retirement age from 65 to 67. Being the super genius mathematician that I am, it took me only a few tens of seconds to calculate that 67 was exactly 30 years henceforth. After confirming my calculations with a computer, I experienced a feeling of intense heaviness and dread. I cannot explain or justify that feeling, except that the thought of doing the same research and publishing the same paper using different phrasing and slightly different analyses, was just very existentially overwhelming. I had a vision of retiring in 30 years, having 1000 scientific publications, but only actually publishing maybe five unique papers.
This feeling intensified during the COVID work-from-home era. I had a very comfortable apartment in a great neighborhood in a great city. I was extremely fortunate to have been in a job and life situation where I was safe, comfortable, had no deep fears or concerns about my health or that of the people around me. On the other hand, everyday was so predictable and repetitive. I went to the same market, ate the same food, did the same work, had the same online meetings, read the same book, did the same morning home-workout. I even pooped at the same time each day.
It was soul-crushing and I had to get out.
I can appreciate the irony of the situation: My life was safe, easy, stable, healthy, and predictable. I think that most humans spend their entire lives craving and working towards the kind of ease and comfort that I was enjoying. And yet, I wasn’t enjoying it.
The thought of doing exactly one thing with my entire adult life was just very depressing. I used to travel and backpack a lot in my 20s, and then in my 30s I thought that that was the time in my life to settle down and grow roots and build a forever-home. It took a decade for me to realize that that was not the right life choice or situation for me. I’m grateful that I made a valiant attempt at a stationary life, because if I never tried I would spend the rest of my life in doubt. But I can comfortably say now that spending the rest of my life in one space in one city in one country with one professional pursuit, is just definitely not right for me.
Also, it used to be the case that academia provided most of my life values. But that was no longer the case. I’ve already discussed intellectual stimulation; feeling that I am contributing something of value back to the world is another important value to me. I started having a sneaking suspicion that if all of my research, all my publications, every data point I’ve ever collected and published, would suddenly be erased from the universe, human civilization would be no worse off, and none the wiser.
Curiously, I lost my passion for research, and gained a new passion for teaching. And yet, I wasn’t teaching at university. I was a research professor, and my salary was funded by research grants. I gave a few guest lectures here and there, but that was it. I realize that’s a dream situation for lots of faculty, and this next part is going to sound even weirder: I actually asked my department chair to give me more teaching. He said that could be possible, but only when the curriculum changes in 2 to 3 years.
And still, I would be teaching to a small group of very privileged, educated, mostly white people from wealthy European countries. To be clear: privileged wealthy people from privileged wealthy countries deserve a good education. But, so do less privileged people from less privileged countries. I don’t feel guilty offering top quality education to already privileged people, but I do feel guilty about less privileged people not having access to that same education.
And that inspired me to shift my teaching from the brick walls of the ivory tower to various online sources, including YouTube, Udemy, and Substack. I’ve even uploaded a few videos to TikTok, although I don’t really think I can build a following in that space. I also write books, some of which are self-published and others with traditional publishers.
My post academic life
My last paycheck was September 2022. There have been a few times that I considered the possibility of regretting leaving. I even applied for a teaching faculty position at <redacted> and was offered a position. But I turned it down. I also applied and interviewed for jobs related to technical AI safety and AI-human alignment. The period of most doubt was in winter to spring of 2024, coinciding with a small burnout and my recovery thereof.
But, each time doubt creeps in, I always come back to the same conclusion: My current lifestyle and career are what’s best for me personally and the best way for me to have a positive impact and contribute value to people’s lives.
I spend my professional time (which is indistinguishable from my personal time) creating high-quality, low-cost education on technical topics like AI, applied math, machine learning, data science, signal processing, statistics,... etc etc insert some other buzzword terms here.
If you want to know more about the stuff that I produce, then the internet is your friend.
I will close this post by saying that I absolutely love 90% of my lifestyle and career choice, but included in that 10% is that my income comes from royalties from people buying my books, enrolling in my online courses, and being a paid subscriber here on Substack. And that means I have to do marketing and outreach, and write paragraphs like this.
If you would like to support me so I can continue making high-quality affordable and globally accessible education, then please consider enrolling in my online courses, buying my books, or being a paid subscriber here on Substack.
Assistant Professor here. I use your textbook and Udemy materials to teach my neural time series analysis class at a tech institute in India. You have indeed created immense value for all of us. Thanks for your brave decision to quit academia to focus on teaching.
I have one suggestion though: if you ever update your neural time series data analysis book, it would be good to include a few appendices with easy to follow proofs and formulae of stuff like the Hilbert transform. I found it very helpful to do the path integrals to see how it works. I also understood why for instance you used a wavelet as the signal to explain a lot of concepts. I gathered that was because signals in general, via the Fourier transform, could be represented using similar complex exponential bases, so if one understands how these transforms work with a complex wavelet, then it becomes easy to build an intuition for general signals. It would be great if such additional insights and motivations could be included in the next iteration.
Thanks again for your work!
I enjoyed reading your journey. Life Ebbs and Flows and a wonderful part of that journey is to realize it’s time for the next challenge. I went back to school to get my masters at age 48. At age 53, I have 5 papers, and I’m applying to PHD programs in Cognitive Neuroscience. Your books and courses have helped me immensely. You are an inspiring educator! Thank you for Sharing your knowledge and experiences.