Most of the time when I sit down to write posts, I have a particular audience in mind.

Most of my clients are tenured or tenure-track academics in the social sciences and humanities, or the equivalent. Sometimes I have specific individuals in mind when I write, even though I am writing about the issue because I know it applies more widely.

I share these posts on Twitter, where I follow a wide range of people, many of whom are not at all associated with academe: knitters, homeschoolers, old friends, other small business owners, people I have come across because they have said interesting things and someone I follow has replied or retweeted those interesting things …

And you know what? Those people often read my posts, tell me how useful they are, retweet the link to their followers. Here’s one example:

@Ipstenu is not an academic. As far as I know she doesn’t have a PhD, nor any desire to get one. She works in what academics sometimes refer to as The Real World™.

The things I say about careers, workload, and so on resonate with her. They resonate with other people who work out there in The Real World™, too.

Maybe you want academia to be different. Really different. So different that anything I said about it would make people outside of the academic world screw up their faces and wonder if they’d dropped into a parallel universe.

It’s not. You work for a large organization with thousands of employees. That entails a certain level of rational organization that we call bureaucracy (Max Weber figured this out over 100 years ago; ask a sociologist). That organization is part of a wider economic system that is capitalist in nature. As Marx pointed out many many years ago, that doesn’t mean elements of feudalism don’t remain and academia does carry a few of those.

The things that are happening to academic labour are happening in pretty well every sector of the economy: the decline of secure employment, downward pressure on wages, increased workloads, reduction in benefits, increase in casual and precarious employment, etc.

There are great reasons to be an academic. I will continue to serve the community who does this work because I believe that the work can be rewarding and is valuable.

And for those of you who don’t find it rewarding or who, due to circumstances you can’t control, have been unable to find a way to secure the academic position you want, the world outside is not a big scary pit of vipers. You do not need to abandon all of your values and develop a completely new skill-set to find a rewarding job in another sector. You may not even have to leave the sector, just broaden your view of how you might fit within it.

Yes this is scary. Yes it is hard work. There is no easy path.

This post was edited July 14, 2015.