In February 2024, I defended my second dissertation and earned the highest academic degree Russia awards. By June, I knew I wanted out. Out of this kind of research, out of this academic system and out of this country.
Russia has two successive research degrees: the Candidate of Sciences, roughly equivalent to a PhD, and the Doctor of Sciences, a later, higher doctorate. I earned both. You do not need to remember the titles. The point is that I had cleared both major levels of the game before finally admitting that I no longer wanted the life attached to its prize.
This was not an impulsive post-defense crash. The crisis had been building for years -- years spent grinding, adding complexity, and taking all sorts of detours instead of grabbing myself by the balls and admitting that I was climbing a ladder propped against the wrong building.
An academic career is supposedly built around research. The problem with my research was that I could no longer explain, without hiding behind academic vocabulary, what I was actually doing, what my findings were, or whether they were valid at all.
Much of my research began with a large claim about society (e.g., "consumer culture constructs identities") and I then searched texts for language that could illustrate that claim. Because almost any passage could be interpreted that way through a sufficiently flexible framework (and enough imagination), it was difficult to say what evidence would prove the claim wrong.
I know this bothered me on some level. But instead of addressing that, I kept adding one theoretical layer on top of another. Identity, values, ideology, post-modernity; critical discourse analysis, rhetoric, persuasion, functional grammar, genre analysis, sociolinguistics, metapragmatics. At least in my hands, each new framework became another way to support a conclusion I had largely reached in advance. The vocabulary grew more sophisticated; the basic procedure changed much less than I wanted to admit. The methodology remained eclectic, the analysis increasingly esoteric, and the claims difficult to test.
You may never have defended a dissertation or cited Foucault to support a claim. But you may know the move: when a project or career no longer survives a basic question, you respond by making it more elaborate. Complexity becomes a way to postpone the verdict.
What I needed was not more frameworks to make unconstrained interpretations sound more substantial. I needed methods with clearer procedures, evidence requirements, and failure conditions. Continuing as I had was safe. The next move was clear, whereas doing something different(ly) would have made me a beginner.
The system rewarded this work just enough to make it difficult to leave. On paper, I kept progressing. The route to another degree was formal and predictable; submitting my work to more selective international journals, where reviewers could simply reject it, was not. I published articles, but these were in Russian journals where rejection was unlikely. I chose the safe scoreboard I knew how to win.
The painful part was that the credentials I had become so good at earning carried little weight outside Russia -- and I had wanted to leave the country for as long as I could remember. There were real constraints, but much of what kept me there was plain fear. Either way, I stayed.
In the summer of 2024, I knew something had to give. I started questioning everything and discarding what I thought was not working or getting in the way. I burned the bound copy of my second dissertation. I eventually deleted most of the research notes I had accumulated during that period.
In the fall of 2024, at 41, I enrolled in a course in computational linguistics and natural language processing and became a complete beginner. I had no coding experience. I had no idea what a p-value was or why the hell anyone would take the logarithm of a number.
For the past few months, I have been back at work on a project that makes much more sense to me. I don’t yet know whether this will become the right game. But it has one property much of my previous work lacked: reality gets a vote. Code fails. The parsers disagree. And the data can refuse the story I want to tell.
In this project and elsewhere, I am now trying to judge work by what survives outside its own scoreboard: a transferable skill, a finished artifact, a reader, a useful result, an opportunity -- perhaps even a little more freedom.
As I write this, I am looking around an apartment that gets emptier every day. My fiancée and I have been getting rid of our belongings. Yesterday, we booked one-way tickets for a flight that leaves in a few weeks. I don’t know where we will be six months from now.
Twenty years in the wrong game taught me that difficulty is not evidence of value. It only proves that the game is difficult.
Originally published: 2026-08-19