Dec 2025
The unspoken social expectation associated with being a PhD student is that anybody, anytime, can ask you, So what are you thinking about these days?, and you must have an interesting answer.
This question is so mundane in academic circles that I don't think we realize that it would be weird to ask it in the real world. Sure, you can ask What's happening? or Who do you think is going to win the election? but many people would be positively dumbstruck at What have you been thinking about? Granted, that is partly because people do not know that the question is synonymous with What have you been working on recently?, but even if they did, it would still be weird because, at least in my experience, many people find their job boring and do not consider it an enjoyable topic for small talk.
The other reason it's a weird question is due to the metric by which academics judge the acceptability of an answer. Acceptability is mainly a function of two variables: complexity of the idea, and how cheerful you seem about it. Some examples:
If I were to rank these options in terms of how happy I would be to use them, it would be 1 > 2 ~ 3 > 4. It is hard to pick between 2 and 3, it would depend on my state of mind that day.
Is the cheerfulness expectation surprising? I think if I did not know anything about research I would nevertheless be able to guess that researchers value complexity, but I would be surprised by the apparent importance of cheerfulness. I think overall this is a good thing because it means people want you to be having fun in your PhD, but it does have some downsides.
Research is very hard, and more often than not whatever you are working on will not be working. There will be bugs, performance will be subpar, and you will be wondering whether you had any talent at all. This is, to my understanding, normal. But the expectation for cheerfulness disincentivizes expressing these emotions publicly, which deletes a potential source of comfort, i.e. other people expressing the same feelings and relating with you.
The other issue is the "Instagram" problem. If nobody expresses their frustration with research, everybody thinks that others have it easier than them, are smarter than them, or some combination of those things. Such thoughts provide a breeding ground for impostor syndrome, another feeling that is also apparently quite common in PhD students.
In any case, I don't think this is a very big problem. It can often be solved by a little bit of courage, i.e. admitting that you are struggling even if you think others are not, or by a little bit of hardwork, i.e. making progress on your project so you get to a high complexity, high cheerfulness phase. It would undoubtedly be better if not expressing cheerfulness was more acceptable, but I don't know how to change systemic things like that.