The Value of Sterility, or How to Survive Academia

🅰 AN ACADEMIC INSIGHT 🅰

Academic writing, despite its notorious dryness, does give us something valuable. It structures. It disciplines. It trains the ability to hold a thought. Yes, this skill can look like a cage — but sometimes it is precisely the cage that lets you take flight.

📊 The scientific approach is not an absolute, but it offers tools. It teaches us to bracket the personal and build bridges between ourselves and others. Universalizing private experience — that is what a dissertation does when it takes form. That form may be a rough brick rather than a poetic crystal, but it can hold up the building of an argument.

📈 In science, the important question is not only “why?” but also “why do you believe this?” It is a practice of doubt, sharp as a scalpel and honest as a metaphor.

One of the strongest advantages of a large work — a doctoral dissertation, for example, especially in psychology, which is what I am talking about — is the chance to conduct a kind of self-analysis through the chosen topic. Maslow described it this way:

We must honestly accept and openly express the deep truth that much “objective” research is simultaneously subjective, because the external world is often isomorphic with the internal one; the “external” problems we try to solve “scientifically” are often also our internal problems, and solving them is, in principle, self-therapy in the broad sense of the word.

I have also heard another idea. I do not know its original source, but I heard it from a dean of a psychology faculty. The idea is that during their first two or three years, psychology students solve their own personal problems at the faculty. I strongly agree, but I would take the idea further. I see it like this: around the third year, students choose the topic that will become their graduation thesis. To me, this gives some indication of the problem that may actually be sitting unconsciously inside a particular student. Then the student decides whether the result was satisfying — whether the problem was resolved or not. If not, one can continue, at least within the Bologna system, and devote another two years to the topic. But truly deep work on a topic becomes possible only in postgraduate study. At least that is how I experience the sequence.

On one hand, this is an astonishing and beautiful feature of psychology as a science. On the other, it is perfectly understandable: you cannot remain uninvolved in something to which you have devoted eight years in total.

🅰 WHO HAS THE BIGGER CLUB? 🅰

Another positive side of postgraduate study:

In academia, truth is not what is experienced. It is what is demonstrated. The winner is not the person with the deepest feeling, but the one with the stronger reference. There is a certain absurdity in this — and a certain order.

🎶 “What truth? What matters is presenting it convincingly!”

💡 In this sense, the academic game is not merely a restriction but also a protective system. It prevents ideological chaos from swallowing science. It prevents demagoguery from disguising itself as revelation. And it helps us stop taking every falsehood at face value — because critical thinking is not handed to us at the entrance; it is trained like a muscle.

🧑‍🏫 Steven Pinker writes:

Education really does perform its task: it cultivates respect for established facts and strong arguments, so educated people acquire something like an inoculation against conspiracy theories, sweeping conclusions from isolated cases, and heartfelt demagoguery.

📊 And the skill of “critical thinking” develops: recognizing false dichotomies, spotting straw men, noticing appeals to authority, ad hominem attacks, and other cognitive traps. All of this is protection. And a tool. And... yes, sometimes a club.

🅰 TRUTH AND HELL 🅰

Sometimes you want to express all of this more simply. For example, with that phrase we used to hear during breaks:

😅 “You can't f**ing fool me — a dck doesn't look like a lily of the valley!”

Or in French:

«Lorsque la vérité est révélée, elle contient aussi l’enfer» 🎭

When truth is revealed, it also contains hell. 🎭

And that is true. A naked thought is always risk. And pain. And freedom. Sometimes emptiness, too.

🅰 MY POSTGRADUATE HELL 🅰

When you submit another postgraduate report, nobody asks about meaning. Only checkboxes: two papers, 30% of the text, a list of sources read. Everything completed — good job. About what? Why? Why does this work matter to you, or to the world? Nobody asks.

🧑‍🏫 Yet the idea, not the reporting, should be the core. The system is not interested in the core. It is interested in the shell.

🌀 Still, I did not stop. Intuitively I felt that even if the system was deaf, it was not meaningless. It was simply unfinished. And it was up to me whether meaning would exist inside it.

🅰 MY PERSONAL POSTGRADUATE CONCLUSION 🅰

Looking back now, I realize that academic education, despite its sometimes sterile form, gives powerful tools for analysis and thought. It helps develop the ability to argue and justify one's positions, which in turn brings value on a personal level. But it is important to remember that academic knowledge becomes truly useful only in balance with the living, dynamic process of change — in psychotherapeutic practice and in life.

🧭 And just now, while writing this text, I remembered the saying:

When you're going through hell, keep going.

I finished postgraduate school, and I honestly do not know whether comparing it to hell is fair — perhaps that is too much. But one thing I can say for certain: I did not stop.

One of our psychology lecturers at Lesgaft University once said something powerful:

Don't take a year off after your master's. Go straight into postgraduate study. Otherwise you won't want to later.

And I understand how right he was. If I had not gone straight into postgraduate study, if I had stopped, I probably would not have made it to the end.

So yes, apparently I too:

🎶 “Walked straight toward the gates of hell, skidded on the turns — did everything the other way around.”

Postgraduate study was one hell of a whirlpool.

🅰 CONCLUSIONS AND OPEN QUESTIONS 🅰

Academic education is like a strict mirror. It shows you not what you want to see, but what is there. It does not inspire — but it hardens. It does not warm — but it cleanses.

So perhaps that is the path? To pass through the hell of form in order to find the freedom of content?

Sources 📚

1. Pinker S. Enlightenment Now. Moscow: Alpina, 2021.
2. Quote from the Oxxxymiron* vs ST battle (marked 🎶).
3. Maslow A. Toward a Psychology of Being. Moscow: Akademicheskiy Proekt, 2022. 275 p.

* Designated a “foreign agent” in Russia.