Oliver Bogler, Chief Executive Officer of Night Science Institute and Strategic Advisor at Barnacle Labs, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Nobody talks about the loneliness of the mid-career.
Early career has built-in community. The lab, the cohort, the postdoc group, the shared struggle that makes it natural to compare notes and lean on each other. You’re all navigating the same uncertainty, and the culture permits vulnerability in that context.
Mid-career changes the structure.
You’re no longer the person asking for help – you’re the person everyone comes to for it. Your students need your guidance. Your junior colleagues need your advocacy. Your department needs your committee service. The professional identity you’ve built over a decade is partly built on being the person who has answers.
Which makes it nearly impossible to say, out loud, that you’re struggling.
Not because the people around you wouldn’t understand – many of them are experiencing the same thing. But because the role you occupy doesn’t easily permit it.
Department chairs are assumed to be managing fine. Principal investigators are expected to project stability for their labs. The more senior you become, the less the culture allows you to be uncertain.
So the uncertainty goes somewhere else. It shows up as irritability, or disconnection, or a creeping sense that something important is missing that you can’t quite name.
Mid-career isn’t lonely because you’re isolated. It’s lonely because the professional identity you’ve built doesn’t leave much room for the human being underneath it.
I’m curious: who do you actually talk to about the harder parts of this career stage?”
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