The Lazy and the Workaholic

“That girl is a robot.” said one of them referring to me while checking the publicly published exam results on the board from one of our many practice exams before we took the real university entrance exam. I was behind them waiting to check my results, but thanks to their comments I now knew that I got the top score again.

I wasn’t sure if I should reveal myself to them. They didn’t actually know me. They knew me only by name. I have been a straight-A student most of my educational life up until the point I started my PhD. I am not saying this to be douchey, this is a fact of my life. Even if people didn’t know me, they may have known of me because of my grades in various schools I attended. I didn’t intend that this fact became a defining fact for me. I just wanted to do my best in the subjects we were studying. That desire and ambition came naturally to me back then. So I didn’t mind working hard, as hard as I could.

In the end, I decided not to reveal myself to them. I thought this would save all of us from embarrassment. I was for a brief moment upset that they called me “a robot”, though. Why? I thought. But I let go of it quickly as I knew that they didn’t really know anything about me. If they had known me, they wouldn’t have had called me a robot.

 

When I started my PhD, I was all of a sudden “the lazy one” despite being the same me. People in the lab didn’t tell this to my face, but I got to learn that behind my back I was criticized by some people (not all) a few times for leaving the lab early in the evenings instead of being there till 10pm or so every day. Instead to my face I was told things like “If you worry about this much about the internet connection at your home, it means that you aren’t working enough.” while I was talking about internet being down at my apartment that I just moved in; or “You are too honest” after saying that “I preferred watching a movie or reading a book after I was finished with course duties during college instead of coding extra stuff that isn’t needed for my studies”, as if this was a super crazy confession I was supposed to be ashamed of.

While on holidays at my parents’ house in Istanbul, I did a code-commit on New Year’s Eve, while I still worked in that lab, and was congratulated for that. The code didn’t work well in the end. The corresponding paper submission received a reject. I had to leave the lab after a semester. The good news was that I started having my period regularly once a month again, instead of the irregular almost twice a month behavior that semester, as soon as I stopped working in that lab.

I ended up changing two advisors in my first year. After that first year in my PhD, I swung between “lazy” and “workaholic” depending on the person I met. In practice, I was still the same in terms of how hard I worked, but with a slightly hindered ambition and desire for the work I was doing. It took more energy to motivate myself now compared to my high school self who was called “a robot”. I realized that despite doing very hard work, you can still fail many times with suboptimal experimental results or various forms of academic rejections, and you can be perceived as lazy, while at the same time being perceived as workaholic.

Toward the end of my PhD, I realized that hard work still pays off in the long run despite how people perceive you. The rewards just come from a different route or at a different moment in time than you expect sometimes.

 

My swinging between “lazy” and “workaholic” continued while I was working in Bay Area at IBM Almaden, where I had my first job after PhD. To be clear, for people at Almaden, I was just working the normal amount. The various perceptions came from outside Almaden.

Then, I revealed that I want to leave Bay Area and move back to Europe. A few people indicated that this move should be because I preferred not working all the time.

 

I ended up in Denmark, where I became “the workaholic” all of a sudden. I heard from Danish people things like “If you stay too much in the office, people would think something is wrong with you.”, “In this country, we work 37 hours a week. You don’t have to stay here this late.”, “It is Friday evening, it is time to leave the office.” … Then, in Danish class, we were reading about how the Danes leave the office at 4pm to have time for family and friends and activities, and a frequent discussion topic was pros/cons of being a “career person”, where one of the cons is typically family neglect.

I was again a person who didn’t know how to fit similar to the first year of my PhD. This time, however, with good regular menstrual cycles, but terrible PMSs in terms of how down I felt and how much I cried. I also had a weak support system in Denmark at the time, which amplified this situation.

As a side note, I would like to highlight that the sentences mentioned above came from very well-intentioned people, and these are all nice people that I like. In contrast, I had more of a love & hate relationship with the Danish class reading materials and discussion topics, and I am happy that I passed the big Danish exam and don’t have to go to those classes anymore. I am grateful to my Danish teachers, though, and the ability to read and watch Danish materials of my own choosing.

My problem is that such attitudes could be unhealthy as well, similar to the attitudes I received during the first year of my PhD, even though they are way more well-intentioned. We people don’t have to be uniform in the way we work or form a family or social life. Even for an individual, what he/she prioritizes typically changes over their lifetime.

I was a new academic who wanted to have a good career trajectory. I have always been an ambitious person. I like working hard and long for reaching my ambitions. The reason I don’t have a husband or kid isn’t because I work too much. I don’t want to be labeled as the “wrong person” or “workaholic” for these. Similarly, I have always invested in having a fulfilling social life with friends and family I interact with regularly. I have always needed my time during the week to watch movies/series or to read books, otherwise, I become an unhappy person, which impacts my work creativity and productivity as well. I don’t like working while enjoying my coffee, even though this becomes inevitable during the work days. I don’t want to be labeled as the person who doesn’t give high importance to her career or “the lazy one” for these habits.

 

I worked a lot more than I worked for IBM during my first two years in Denmark as a junior academic, as I was teaching and writing grants for the first time (this is without counting the Danish classes). However, I didn’t really count my hours back then, so I don’t have data to reveal here. I remember feeling a lot more tired for sure compared to now. I have recently started counting my working hours. I can tell you with confidence that today I work on average 8 hours a work day. This is really the average time. I may work more one day/week and take it easy on another. I may take a break to meet a friend during the day on a work day if I don’t have meetings, and compensate for it in the evening or over the weekend. I don’t limit myself in terms of when “work time” is vs when “free time” is. I prefer a flexible and non-uniform schedule, where I have more control over my time, which is one of the reasons I love academia. The only goal I have is that I work ~8 hours **on average** per work day.

I started doing this counting thanks to the advice I got from my colleague Björn Thór Jónsson during a period I was feeling desperate in terms of my time management. I needed a way to know when to stop working without feeling stressed about my TODO list as well as knowing when to say “no” at work. I appreciate that I receive a lot of good opportunities in this job and I love to help others as much as I can. However, everything takes time, especially if you want to do a good job. Saying “yes” to one thing may mean that I cannot invest the necessary time for another thing that I find very important. Counting my time helps me to see my limits and realize when I should say “no” or when I should be satisfied with an OK job instead of perfecting stuff.

Since I started counting my hours, I also realized that working more than 8 hours on average a work day doesn’t really work well for me. If I work more than this, I start to eat unhealthy, ignore too much my other house duties or non-work-related bureaucratic paperwork, or become unable to invest the time I want to invest in family, friends, books, movies, writing this blog post, etc. I understand that different people may have a different balance and needs in their life, and my flexible-8-hours rule may not work for them. I do respect people who choose to work less or more than this number as well as people who prefer a more uniform work schedule. We aren’t uniform, so what works for each of us can be different.

I am well-aware that I may not be the best person to give advice on how much one should work. My initial years as an academic were quite productive looking back, but wasn’t much of a success based on the publication-based success criteria of this job. However, I just know now that I am neither lazy nor workaholic (nor a robot), and I neither want to use any of these terms to label anyone I know in my profession nor indicate that there is one and only one correct way of pursuing this profession. Please avoid being impacted by external labels and putting labels on people as much as you can. Please beware that other people’s solutions may not suit you, and your solution may not suit everyone. Please don’t be afraid to seek for what suits you best, and don’t be afraid to change it over time.

Series & Films about/for Grief – Manchester by the Sea

First, I want to confess that I have no particular agenda with these grief posts. I just wanted to write about my experience with grief and acknowledge some of the films and series about grief that I find very genuine and helpful.

In this post, we are moving from collective grief to personal one with Manchester by the Sea (2016), which is a film that is easy to label as depressing or heavy (or tung as the Danes will say). I, on the other hand, find it to be one of the most optimistic films ever made. It is one of my favorite films. I will argue why the rest of this post.

I will do my best not to reveal too much more than the film’s synopsis and trailer already reveal, but some of my comments may hint more. If you are interested in this film and want to be on the safe side, don’t read this.

Manchester by the Sea deals with grief that is triggered by the loss of family members, especially the ones that we lose too early. It starts with the lead character Lee Chandler learning the death of his older brother, who was maybe in his early 50s or younger. As a result, Lee finds himself back in his hometown to deal with the aftermath of this death, and the film reveals things about his past that hide bigger sources of grief.

When Lee arrives at the hospital his brother died in, his various reactions (face, body, and speech) is what captivated me and pulled me into the story. None of his reactions are the traditional expected dramatic movie reactions to loss. Lee stays calm and reserved upon hearing the news. He jumps into practical matters immediately like whom to inform about the death. In parallel, his face, eyes, and awkward body movements tell a completely different story, and mirror his grief. That whole hospital sequence beautifully and heartbreakingly illustrates how grief could be so silent and hidden behind everyday matters or duty after the loss of a loved one.

The film then continues with further genuine depiction of loss in family, at least a depiction of loss that I could recognize very well. On the one hand, you have to deal with the practical matters like the funeral. On the other hand, life goes on as if nothing happened and you have to function somehow as before in the society. You may even laugh or feel real joy at certain moments. In between, when you catch a break, you are left alone with your grief or sometimes your grief comes out when you least expect it. Throughout all this, if you are lucky, your support system (family and friends) gives you the biggest strength to keep going.

The realistic depiction of all these facets of life after loss is the beauty of this film. It underlines that life still goes on after loss and there is still a place for us in it no matter how much it hurts at that moment. We don’t have the power to pause either life or our grief. We may never be the same person as before. Some things may break beyond full recovery. We may grieve all our lives for certain losses. Still, we can find a way to move forward, especially with the help of our support system, even if it requires us to rebuild our broken core and transform our grief, even if it takes years of work. If this isn’t an extremely optimistic message to end with, I don’t know what is.

Completely cheerful films may have the effect of a healthy drug that makes us forget hard things. They are certainly valuable. Movies like Manchester by the Sea, on the other hand, can help us face hardship in life in a non-self-destructive way and find a way to move forward.

I watched Manchester by the Sea the week it had its wide-release in USA. It was December 2016. I didn’t know anything about its synopsis. I just knew it was supposed to be one of the highlights of the year, which was the year of La La Land and Moonlight. It was also roughly 10 days after my dad told me over Skype (I lived in Bay Area then, my parents live in Turkey) that he had a mild heart attack that summer. (He is doing alright now.) I didn’t know what to do, felt so powerless, and didn’t know whom to talk to or even how to talk about this.

My father lost two of his older brothers when I was 8 and 10, respectively. They passed away two years apart on the same age in their early 50s. When it comes to expressing his grief, my dad has been minimalist. His grief was certainly visible, especially in the early days, but also appeared sporadically over the years. Lee Chandler’s reserved nature when it comes to his grief reminded me so much of my father’s back when we were going through all the funerals and wakes. In addition, Manchester is a gloomy costal town in USA similar to the town I come from in Turkey. In short, it isn’t very difficult to pull me into Manchester by the Sea on any day. It is like looking at an old family photo album.

So that December, some months after my discovery of The Leftovers and 10 days after learning my dad’s heart attack, I got another unexpected helping hand in a movie theater helping me process my fear of potentially losing my dad and also remember my uncles joyfully.

 

P.S. After writing this post, I found this video that talks about how the music and camera angles used in this film also amplifies the realistic depiction of grief. It contains spoilers, though.

Series & Films about/for Grief – The Leftovers

“You always like watching heavy stuff. Why don’t you watch something more cheerful?” or a version of this statement is something I have been told many times in my life. It is not that I don’t watch cheerful stuff, but it is true that I do like stories that are considered heavy.

People may think such stories are, even if they are very good, depressing (or not hyggelig in Denmark). I think the contrary. Depending on the ending, and unless it is a Gaspar Noé movie, such stories can give you the positivity, peace, and hope you need to move forward.

In this light, I decided to briefly write about some of the films and series that helped/help me to process different forms of grief I had/have from time to time in this blog.

But first, some definition … The textbook (or the wikipedia) definition of grief is “the response to loss”. This loss can come in different forms and intensities from letting go of a beloved routine (even if it opens up room for another beloved routine) to saying goodbye to a close friend (even if you are moving to a new place that you are very excited about) to death of a loved one (even if our loved one lived a good long life). Despite being a healthy response to loss, grief is not an easy thing to process even in lighter cases like the loss of a beloved routine, because we aren’t very welcome to talk about it publicly light or heavy. This is what grief has in common with menstruation.

Now, let’s move onto the series I want to write about in this post: The Leftovers (2014-2017).

An academic brother once called this series “depression in audio-visual form”. It is true, I cannot argue with that.

On the other hand, Emily Nussbaum, the ex-TV-critic of The New Yorker, writes “But it captures the disorientation of grief in a way that is provocative and rare for television.”, which is why I love this series so much.

The Leftovers tackles grief that is triggered as a result of a collective trauma, which is due to the disappearance of two percent of the whole global population. Different individuals react to this loss differently: divorce, faith, creating/joining a cult, repeating a thrill …, while the life moves on in parallel. All these reactions depicted in a manner that feels well-thought-out and genuine instead of cheesy or just for the sake of drama.

There were already two seasons out, when I started watching The Leftovers, which was mid-August 2016. It was roughly a month after the July 15, 2016 military coup attempt in Turkey, which is an example of an event that creates collective trauma for a nation. I wrote about how I felt in those days in an earlier blog post back in early August 2016. Starting to watch The Leftovers shortly after that wasn’t a calculated choice from my side by no means. I started watching it with no particular expectations. It was just in “my watchlist” for too long. It turned out to be an unexpected helping hand. In those days, The Leftovers was one of the rare things that managed to reach me at an emotional level and broke my numbness. I am forever grateful to it.

The Leftovers is also annoyingly-fitting for the time we are going through right now, which is why I chose it to be the first thing I discussed as part of this Series & Films about/for Grief posts. If you need to watch something to process your grief of all the losses you had to experience as a result of the current pandemic, just give The Leftovers a try or re-try.

Impact

She came to pick me up from the Istanbul airport. Later that day, I had a midnight bus to Ören (a coastal town west of Turkey), where my parents were at the time. We would hang out at her place till then. She prepared menemen and fresh green beans, some of my favorite Turkish dishes, for dinner. Those are the moments I take off the 40 layers of armor I accumulated over the years living abroad and start feeling lighter.

She has always been very generous with me and she loves me very much. She was at my public defense at EPFL. She was there when I first moved to Copenhagen. She is like an older sister, one of the many I have despite being the only child of my parents. The reason she loves me, though, doesn’t have much to do with me. I know that. She loves me because she loves my mother.

My mother was one of her professors at the university. I am very well aware that she doesn’t take all her professors’ kids from the airport. She loves my mother because she values the impact my mother had and maybe still have on her life as a teacher. I value the impact both of them have on my life.

She is not the only ex-student my mother has that has been extremely generous with us as a family. In fact, there was one other ex-student of my mom at my public defense at EPFL, and shortly after I moved to Copenhagen, I met two of my mom’s ex-students who live in the area. My dad has some ex-students that are similar, though my mom would win by a landslide if it was a competition. This doesn’t mean that all her students loved her, as I also witnessed students who treated my mom as if she was a witch to be burned.

I ended up a university professor myself, just like my parents, as cliché as it is. I cannot tell you that I wanted to be professor in a computer science department as a child. At those ages, I wanted to be million things from a basketball player to a traveling hobbit. But I wished for a job that can incorporate some teaching/mentoring component, since I dreamed of having the kind of impact I observed my parents had on many of their students as well as some of my school teachers had on me. Having that type of direct impact on an individual’s life seemed like the biggest kind of impact one can have in this world to me.

 

In my professional community, the dominant use of the word impact has a different meaning than the one I related to growing up. Most people would use it to indicate either creating a (software/hardware) product or writing code for a (software/hardware) product. While I recognize this as an extremely valuable impact one can have in life and I admire the people who accomplish it, I must confess that this has never been the main driving force in my work. When I was at IBM Research, I was in a team that designed and wrote code for a new IBM product, and I enjoyed that work and I am happy the product is out, but more than that, I enjoyed having student interns. Most of the time, I feel scared to say these things out loud at a work-related gathering, where academics tend to be mocked for not accomplishing real-world impact with a disregard of the role of advisors and mentors in someone’s life.

Of course I want to do research on things that have real-world relevance. But more than that I want to help raising the next-generation for our professional community. Even if a PhD student is working on a topic that you think have no real-world impact, it is still highly likely that he/she is actually learning the skillset that will be guiding him/her toward his/her real-world impact once on the job.

 

As the diversity & inclusion efforts are increasing in many scientific communities these days, I think we should also start thinking about valuing the different driving forces and capabilities of individuals at work leading to different forms of impact in our scientific fields.

 

In closing, I want to say that I am extremely grateful for the impact both my BSc advisor Serdar Taşıran, and my PhD advisor Natassa Ailamaki had in my life. And I am still part of the “real-world” despite my dreams of becoming a hobbit, and would be happy to prepare menemen for their kids.