(My most viewed post since I started The Opting Out Blog. Reposted from March 6, 2015)

A friend of mine once asked me if I don’t get tired of people always coming up to me at parties to tell me their opting out story. And the honest truth is no, I never get tired of it. I wish more people would tell me their stories.

It’s true; people often come up to me to talk about opting out. The other day, a woman in my kids’ school asked me if I was the one with the thesis (I had recently been interviewed for our local newspaper), and told me that she is also one of those women. This happens to me quite a lot.

I think it’s wonderful that people recognize themselves in my research, and that it touches them somehow. I feel honored that many want to share their experiences with me. I often hear that I have put words on feelings they haven’t been able to verbalize or analyze themselves. I take this as a great compliment and a sign that my research is close to reality and has managed to capture shared experiences. Because that is what they are, shared experiences. We experience similar struggles in our lives when, for example, trying to combine work with family, or simply trying to manage in an ever more hectic working environment, even though we seldom talk about it. Unfortunately it has been a bit of a taboo to admit that maybe we aren’t doing great when we’re trying to have it all. Many people seem almost surprised that others seem to feel the same way, that they aren’t unique in their frustration, their fatigue, and their turmoil.

Another thing people often want to talk about is what these women opted in to after having opted out. Many women I meet dream of opting out, but don’t know how to go about it, nor do they know what they could do instead. And that is the thing, it is hard to imagine anything other than what we know – it is hard to imagine alternative ways of living and working, which is what people who long to opt out are looking for. Their current lifestyle might not feel meaningful, maybe the stress they experience has a negative effect on their wellbeing, or maybe they are just simply overwhelmed. At the same time there is all this hype and advice on how to be happy, so we expect more of life than just struggling to get by. And rightfully so; this is our only life, we might as well make the most of it.

But unfortunately there is no recipe for opting out and in to new meaningful and manageable lifestyles. The women I have talked to opted in to everything from housewife to entrepreneur. Some have taken top positions in organizations – but on different terms – some have gone back to school and then embarked on a new career. Different people obviously want very different things in their lives and some people want to opt in to types of work that others want to opt out of. The bottom line is that people who opt out, are doing so from a certain way of living and working that is expected of them but that just isn’t working for them in order to adopt a way of life that not only works for them, but that allows them to thrive.

We are all susceptible to other’s expectations and to what other people think we want, or should want. We don’t always realize that we may be living other people’s dreams and not our own. People who opt out typically spend a lot of time soul searching before they actually take the step, and when they finally figure out what it is they are going to opt in to instead, they are pretty clear on who they are, what is important, and what they are and aren’t willing to give up.

Unfortunately there is no magic recipe, but I did read something that I think really hit the nail on its head. Among all the advice on how to find happiness circulating on the Internet, I saw one post that really resonated with me. According to Professor Catherine Sanderson one way to be happy is simply to “figure out what you do well and find ways to do it.” When you do something well you generally feel good about what you do, which in turn feels meaningful. And a meaningful existence really helps when dealing with whatever it is life hands you.

The other day I found out that my post-doc research project was rejected by yet another foundation. I sometimes think that we academics must be gluttons for punishment since this is what we choose to put up with again and again. My husband suggested that I frame the letter of rejection (see my previous post Temporary setbacks for more on framing letters of rejection), except there was no letter of rejection to frame. It was one of these foundations that only lets you know if you do get funding. If you don’t, there’s nothing, no letter, and definitely no feedback regarding why you didn’t get the funding, or what you could do to improve your application.

Well, since there was nothing, I decided to hang an empty frame on the wall of my office instead, which I did, and I find it strangely empowering. I have a beautiful, empty, oval frame over my desk and it reminds me that no matter what setbacks I experience, they are just temporary and they don’t define me. They aren’t going to stop me from getting on with my life and doing whatever it is that I want to do.

While I was hanging the frame, I happened upon a post-it note among the papers on my desk, on which I have apparently jotted down the following quote some time ago:

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.”

– Winston Churchill

How appropriate. I stuck it in the middle of the empty frame.

So I will leave you with these words as I take a break over the next few weeks. I won’t be completely silent though; I’ll be reposting my four most read posts since I started my blog. These posts have by far accumulated the most views, so hopefully you’ll enjoy them! I’ll be back at the beginning of August!

With the risk of turning the entire academic world against me, I’m going to let you in on a secret: to get a PhD, you really don’t have to be a rocket scientist. But you do have to be tenacious and diligent. That means that when working on a PhD, you’re in it for the long haul and you have to have the discipline to keep at it. You can’t give up. Even when you think you are never going to finish, that it will never turn into a thesis, you still don’t give up.

The other thing about working on a PhD is that it is an emotional roller coaster. Especially in an area like the social sciences, where you choose your topic – a topic you’re interested in, or even better, passionate about – you inevitably start to equate yourself with your work. Your thesis becomes a very personal project, and since you’re basically working on your own, your self-esteem fluctuates with your thesis. When work is good you think it’s because you are good, and when work isn’t so good you invariable start feeling that you’re pretty bad yourself. Yes I know, it isn’t true, but that is how it feels.

So it’s years of ups and downs, euphoria and despair – and plain hard work of course – and you stick it through and all of a sudden you’re given the green light to submit your thesis. And then you get on the mini emotional roller coaster of waiting for examiners’ reports, and then you finally get those and you probably have to do some revisions and finally, magically, you finish your thesis and it gets accepted and life is a dream. The happiness I felt when my PhD was accepted is almost hard to describe. It lasted for weeks. A friend of mine said it was like being in love.

And then you realize, that although you made it to the end of your journey, it really wasn’t the end, actually it’s only the beginning. Now you embark on your life as a ‘real’ academic, and to do that you have to publish. That is, you have to write and publish academic papers in order to prove your worth as an academic, and you have to continue doing so again and again to stay in the game.

And that’s where I am right now. Near the beginning of my continued journey, and I’m working on papers. What’s surprising is that writing papers of say 8000 or 15000 words depending on what journal you plan to submit to, is unexpectedly hard. There’s no space to embellish the way I had the luxury of doing in my thesis. And also, after having put my heart and soul into my manuscript, mustering the energy to saying selected bits again but differently feels challenging. Not to mention all the future rejections I’m bracing myself for…

As I reflect over this path I’ve chosen, that certainly doesn’t feel like the easiest path at the moment, I think about tenacity, and realize that this really goes for anything you want to achieve in life. If you want something, you’re just going to have to work hard for it. Most of us are anyway. It reminds me of a TED talk I once saw (here’s another secret, I really like TED talks). I think it was a talk by Brené Brown and she mentioned how although the organizers invite successful people to talk at the TED conferences, the talks are really about failure. Instead of talking about great successes and breakthroughs, the speakers talk the audience through all the failures it took before achieving success. If they had given up the first moment things got tough, they wouldn’t be where they are now, and ironically we wouldn’t have very many success stories to talk about.

So how does this translate to every day life? Well, I’m going to quote my dad whose motto, whether playing a game of chess or navigating professional life, is ‘never give up’.

I once heard of a professor who frames his letters of rejection from academic journals, and hangs them on the wall of his office so that his PhD students and colleagues can see them. And apparently he has lots of them. The reason he does this is that he wants his students to see that although he is a successful and experienced academic, he still gets a lot of letters of rejection, and he doesn’t allow them to deter him from what he wants, and that is to keeping building his career and keep working as an academic.

Last week I received a negative response from a foundation that I had applied for funding from. This was funding I really wanted. It was for three-year postdoctoral research, and I submitted my application in September last year. Yes, it took seven months to find out I didn’t get the funding.

Now, this funding is very prestigious and hard to get, there is only about a 10% chance of getting it, so I knew that the odds were against me. But I still wanted it very much and I’m disappointed of course.

What do you do when things don’t go the way you hoped? That is, other than frame the letter of rejection and hang it on your wall? This was only my first application for this particular project – I still hope to get funding for my post-doc research project elsewhere – but it sort of woke me up to the fact that the next one may also fall through, and the one after that. So I had a mini existential crisis over the weekend, which I spent thinking about whether this way of life that I chose to opt in to, is really any way to live? I mean, no matter how inspirational that professor with his walls covered with letters of rejection is, being an academic and being faced with rejection so often really doesn’t seem like a lot of fun.

However, no matter how hard I think about it, I still can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing than what I’m doing now. Well, for the time being at least, we all know that life changes, and situations, wants, and needs change. But I did realize one thing. I realized how quickly you get sucked in by the rules and structures of whatever world it is in which you live and work, despite being hell-bent on living and working on your own terms, terms that work for you and that reflect what it is that is important to you.

So what you do when hit with rejection and disappointing news is that you pause, think, and then you get up and you get on with your life and carry on with whatever it is you are doing.

I realized that I don’t need to wait around for someone to give me permission to start this post-doc research project. I can start now, small scale, and then expand my research project when I do have funding for it. Ironically, the main criticism I got from this foundation that doesn’t want to fund me, was that since men opting out is virtually a non-explored phenomenon, they aren’t convinced that it really is a phenomenon. In other words, since no one has researched it, they don’t feel convinced that there is anything to research. I obviously wasn’t clear enough in my research proposal, because although men haven’t been a part of the opting out debate, it does not mean that there is not ample research to argue that opting out indeed is a phenomenon that can also encompass men.

So that is what I’m going to do. I’m going to start small scale now, and gather some evidence, which will make future research proposals even stronger. And then I will be able to expand my study once I do have the funding.

So if you are a man who has opted out, or know of a man who has opted out who may be willing to be interviewed, please email me at theoptingoutblog@gmail.com

Remember, I define opting out as leaving mainstream career models and expected ways of working in order to live and/or work on one’s own terms. This can be anything from quitting work altogether to doing the same kind of job but with a different mindset.

Or if you just want to share your opting out story or experiences with me, whether a man or a woman, I would love to hear from you.

All emails are of course confidential and will be treated as such.

So here I go, embarking on the exciting project of studying men and opting out, and exploring how that is similar to or different from women’s experiences. This is something I have been planning to do since I started working on my PhD in 2009, and I simply can’t wait to get started!

I’m working on a paper at the moment, about what a complex phenomenon opting out really is. You’ll often see stories in the media of people who have opted out of their careers to do something completely different: move to the country and raise chickens, sell their house to buy a sailboat and sail the world, open a hotel spa in Thailand, or a café just down the street. These people all seem so happy and it all seems so easy. But opting out is anything but easy.

Those who opt out, generally go through a relatively major crisis that pushes them to take the step. So that which in the colorful pictures of smiling people in magazines looks like an easy, obvious, and sometimes quick decision, really is the result of major feelings of doubt and insecurity, as well as careful deliberation and planning, before daring to take the step and adopt a new lifestyle. And to be completely honest, daring is the wrong word to use here because the people who opt out, rarely feel that they were brave and that they dared to do anything. After having gone through what they did, opting out and in seemed like the only option and was simply something they just had to do.

But even then, even after having taken the step, even though they know that this was what they had to do, they continue to feel uncertain, and they continue to have identity crises as they struggle to come to terms with their new selves and lifestyles. This is because when you have dedicated years to working in a certain way, it becomes such a great part of your identity that leaving often causes an identity crisis.

Now, you may be thinking, she really is painting a painful picture of opting out. But after having finally found and adopted their new lifestyles, the people who opt out and in feel authentic, fulfilled and, yes, happy. Even so, they continue to have moments of doubt, moments when they struggle with their choices.

It is precisely because the opting out phenomenon is so multi-faceted and multi-layered that I never seem to tire of studying it. Opting out is good and it is bad – although mostly good, judging from how the people I’ve interviewed feel about how things turned out. And this complexity reflects life in general. Nothing is all good or all bad. No one is always happy, confident, and successful. No one is supposed to be. That would just be boring.

On bad days – days when I feel like a fraud, thinking any second now people will notice I have no idea what I’m doing – I look at other people; people in the media, for example, who are so successful and seem to have purposefully made it to where they are, knowing exactly what they were doing every step of the way. However, although this may dazzle me for a second, I know that their journeys weren’t any more painless or any less filled with doubt and insecurity that anyone else’s. Experience has taught me that in reality things very seldom go as planned. Unexpected opportunities come up, or plans fall through, making us choose alternative paths, and afterwards we add causality and coherence to our stories, giving meaning to actions, choices, and events in retrospect. Having a coherent life narrative is, after all, important.

But although we try to act otherwise, in reality life is messy. So if you’re worried that you’re the only one who feels lost, or who doesn’t have it all figured out, don’t. No one does. We all just make it up as we go along.

I’ve been a bit under the weather during the past few days, and as a result haven’t really had the energy to see a lot of people nor have I read as much as I usually do; two activities that are my greatest source of inspiration. And since I haven’t had a lot of new impulses, I find that I’m sort of at a loss of what to write about on my blog this week.

While I was working on my thesis, whenever I would feel stuck and just sit there staring at the blank screen, not knowing how to even start, my husband would say, “Read something!” He had noticed a pattern, which I just hadn’t seen. When I read other people’s work I would get ideas and feel inspired, and it would help me get started. So now a days that’s what I do, whenever I find myself stuck, I take a break and read. Sometimes, however, I forget and have to be reminded.

I horseback ride in my free time. Sometimes if I’m doing a particularly difficult exercise with the horse, and if I keep getting it wrong, my instructor will say “If you get it wrong and continue doing the same thing over and over again it’s going to continue going wrong in the same way again and again. Try doing something differently, anything – your posture, the position of your hands, how fast you’re going – anything.” She is right of course and although this is so simple it is sometimes hard to see. And the same goes for life. If you want your life to be different, you’re going to have to do something differently, and if you don’t know what, just start with something, anything. If you continue doing what you have always done, your life will be what it has always been.

I’ve mentioned before how I often get asked for advice on how to opt out, or rather how to find a new lifestyle to opt in to. People want to hear about what other people have done, thinking maybe they will hear a story that they can adopt or duplicate. But it isn’t that simple. Finding what it is that is going to feel meaningful and work in one’s own life is so individual. And there are no short cuts.

But the advice that I sometimes do give when pressed (because although I’m something of an expert on the opting out phenomenon, I’m not an opting out coach or consultant) is that clarity comes with action. And when you’re looking to change your life, there are two things that I think are important.

First, talk to people. Talk to anyone really about your thoughts, your dreams, about what you think you want to do, or just that you want to do something different but you don’t know what. Who knows, someone may have ideas, or even know of opportunities, but also saying things out loud usually helps you see things in a new light and clarify what it is you really want.

And second, try different things. If you don’t do anything differently, if you don’t try anything new, like my riding instructor says, things will continue being the same as they have always been. Again, who knows, one day you might actually try something that you love that turns out to be the thing that you end up opting in to. But if you never try anything new, you will never find anything new.

To be honest, I had no idea how much I was going to love doing research when I opted out and in. I knew I wanted to study more sociology and social psychology, but it wasn’t until I actually started working on my PhD that I realized I wanted to be an academic.

The same can be said about this blog. I was thinking that I should have some sort of platform where I could write and talk about opting out, but honestly I felt reluctant to start blogging. I had never done it before, and although I had been on social media to a certain degree, I really hadn’t been very active. Unexpectedly, this blog has turned out to be a great source of energy for me. I like writing, and as an academic, writing non-academic texts is not only fun, it feels incredibly liberating. Also, the comments I get from my readers here on the blog, on other social media, and in person give me the energy and inspiration to keep writing. It’s exciting to be involved in debates and discussions around the topics that I feel are relevant to this phenomenon that we call opting out, and to how we will organize and reinvent our private and professional lives in the future.

So, now that I’m better, I’m looking forward to inspirational lunches and discussions again. How about it, you know who you are!