When I left academia officially at the end of September 2020 and practically at the end of September 2018, I never imagined that I would be able to "recycle" in my post-academic life some of the skills and habits I seem to have acquired rather unconsciously during my almost 30-year-long life there. But to my pleasant surprise, I was wrong. ;-)
Though I concluded that academia was not for me, I didn't automatically reject all those 30 years there as just a long waste of time. But it was only after leaving academia that I realized clearly for the first time what skills and habits I had acquired - and suppressed.
Leaving academia meant, among other things, being able to study what truly interested me not only intellectually but also spiritually, first and foremost, from books. The skill - or meta-skill, to be more precise - of learning any new subject, at least in the humanities and for myself, from scratch has turned out to be especially handy.
Habits I acquired in academia unconsciously and have been "recycling" more consciously in my post-academic life include preferring the original to a translation, preferring primary sources to secondary interpretations, checking at least three primary sources and/or at least three secondary interpretations, cross-checking both primary sources and secondary interpretations, quoting others verbatim, and giving credit where credit is due, among others. These habits, which I may not have been able to acquire outside academia, have been enhancing both my input and output enormously in my post-academic life, too.
But there are also skills and habits I had to suppress while I was still in academia and could finally "liberate" after leaving it. One skill that I had to suppress consciously and "liberated" consciously concerns how to write. I could finally let go of the illusion of WYSIWYG and the "tyranny" of Word and switch to a plain text editor and Markdown for writing almost everything now. The difference between these two mindsets and tools is like that between swimming in a suit and tie and swimming in minimal swimwear.
Probably the most important habit I could "liberate" is preferring lived experience to conceptual understanding. One academic incident I experienced at the "threshold" of leaving academia made me realize the fundamental difference between lived experience and conceptual understanding in such a vivid way. It was also comical to me in that it was not comical to those who are still in academia. ;-)
Here is the story. After spending a year studying Chabad Chassidus as life wisdom at a special school in Jerusalem, I contacted one association of Jewish studies outside Israel, thinking that some members of this association might benefit from experiencing indirectly this rather rare direct experience of mine. I asked them to allow me to give a non-academic talk. But I was too naive. I received a letter of rejection that said, "Your proposal is not academic enough." ;-)
This and other similar observations of other researchers, first from inside, then from outside, have led me to let go of blind faith in my intellect, then blind faith that I have no blind faith. This, in turn, has led me to decide to continue working on one character trait as an indispensable tool for turning the unknown unknown into the known unknown, and hopefully into the known known in some cases.
So thank you, academia. ;-)
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