Academia

I came close enough to academia to feel its gravity and to see how hard it pulls on people who arrive with curiosity instead of armour; cf. “spaghettification”. It is not that nothing good happens there. Some of it does, almost by accident. Clever people, often exhausted and underprotected, do manage to push insight through the mesh. But the system itself is bloated, inward-facing, and aggressively self-reproductive. It rewards conformity to procedure over contact with reality, compliance over clarity, and survival skills over thought. The politics are petty, the bullying routine, and the worst of it is rarely carried out by thinkers at all, but by managerial strata whose power comes from process, metrics, and gatekeeping rather than understanding. Anyone who has passed through without needing the institution for status or livelihood will recognise this. Those who deny it are usually either protected by it or actively feeding on it.

At a deeper level, this is not just an institutional failure but a structural one. Any system that confuses its own continuity with truth will eventually mistake repetition for depth and noise for rigor. The machinery turns because it must, not because it knows where it is going. What enters as living inquiry is slowly pressed into acceptable shapes until it can be circulated, cited, and forgotten without disturbing anything that already exists. Meaning survives only at the margins, in tension with the apparatus designed to contain it. I did not escape some grand enemy. I simply stepped out of a loop that had begun to mistake motion for progress. The relief came not from rejection, but from recognising that whatever matters most cannot thrive inside a structure that must endlessly reproduce itself to believe it is alive.