The Tolstoy riff is a great hook, and the “monomyth” framing works mostly because it’s really describing an incentive gradient. Early on, the environment is information-dense and socially novel, so you mistake energy for trajectory. Then the organisation’s needs assert themselves: teaching, outreach, grant theatre, internal coordination. None of that is (necessarily) evil, but it competes directly with the one thing the postdoc is implicitly there to convert into a future: publishable research. So, calibration isn’t a mood shift so much as a budget update. In Campbell's terms, the dragon is the calendar.
What I’d love to see (maybe as a follow-up) is the structural question: what policies reliably prevent the “service creep” phase from eating the research phase? I suspect the answer is boring and contractual, which is exactly why it might matter.
What I’d love to see (maybe as a follow-up) is the structural question: what policies reliably prevent the “service creep” phase from eating the research phase? I suspect the answer is boring and contractual, which is exactly why it might matter.