The myth of the ideal
October 30, 2008
The differences between the life of the mythical ideal researcher and my own cause me much worry. I want to free myself from comparisons to that myth.
The myth of the ideal
The idealized researcher has only research on her plate. She has little life outside of research, and is happy with this. Children are are silently added to the family without the mess of pregnancy and birth. Deaths of family or friends do not occur. There are no car accidents, or credit card debts. No self-doubt, no frustration, no procrastination, no lazy days of watching movies; no being sick or exhausted. No hobbies, no job stress. And plenty of time. She is younger than I am, went to a better school and has no complications in life to distract her. Or she is older, and has years of experience, tenure, grant money and freedom to do what she wants. My life is not like that, I am not like that, and I worry that it will be my doom.
I know rationally that these are myths. Books like The Craft of Research and Creativity and Theory and Reality tell me so, to some extent. They reassure me that the research process is not smooth and linear, but full of feedback loops, false starts, accidents, refinement and re-conceptualizations. But I find what they say to be too generalized and abstracted for me to apply to myself and my life. I want details, specific examples. I want to know what it is like for other individual researchers, real people, to go through their process of doing research. I want this because I want to overcome my own buy-in of these myths of the idealized researcher and research process.
When you see a paper in a journal or conference proceedings, or a book whole and clean and published, you see it standing alone, separated from a personal context. I want the detail of that context so that I can see myself in it and be reassured, and stop believing in the myth. I want to see the mortgages that had to be paid, the babies that were born, committees that were endured. That people went to the dentist and had the flu; that they turned 40 or 30 or 50 and were happy or sad about it; that their parents and friends died or were lost and that they grieved for them; that they were victims and perpetrators; that they loved and hated and were apathetic. That they went from a glimmer of an idea to a finished paper or book via a torturous path full of doubt and reworking and false paths and setbacks. Or maybe it was step 1, step 2, step 3, done. And I want to see how they managed their research in spite of or because of all of that, so that I can feel confident in doing so also.
I don’t think that I’m alone in this desire. I think that all new researchers (and possibly established ones, too) become researchers nearly completely through personal process invention because we largely have no choice. We’re given general guidelines, but no examples. And this is hard on new researchers, on me. “Am I doing it right?” is what I ask myself. “Am I the only one that feels like this?” and “Am I the only one that has to live negotiate research and life constantly?” “How do other people do it?”
References
- Booth, W., J. Williams, et al. (2003). The Craft of Research: University of Chicago Press.
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997, June). Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Perennial.
- Godfrey-Smith, P. (2003). Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series): University Of Chicago Press.
