The Kind Academic

There’s a quiet, persistent pressure in academia. It shows up in small thoughts that echo through your day:

Should I be doing more? Am I falling behind? What’s my next step?

As an Early Career Academic, it can feel like everything rests on your ability to prove your worth. Publish papers. Teach brilliantly. Attract funding. Sit on committees. Get noticed. Get tenure. There’s no time to relax when you’re still trying to earn your place.

And then, if tenure comes, the story shifts, but the pressure doesn’t. It simply takes on new forms: promotion, leadership, profile, and performance. In other fields, people get promoted because someone recognises their value. In academia, we’re asked to notice our own worth, document it, and present it as a case. That case has to be strategic, compelling, evidence-based, and perfectly timed. The work on Project You never stops.

It’s a cycle that rarely lets up. You look around and see your colleagues pushing too… all striving, applying, updating, moving. And you wonder if standing still means falling behind.

Recently, though, I’ve started wondering: what if we stopped pushing? What if there’s a kind of kindness in allowing ourselves to just… be?

Now, I know the word “complacency” has baggage. It conjures up images of carelessness or giving up. But I want to propose a different definition. One rooted in self-acceptance, mindfulness, and enoughness. I’m talking about the kindness of complacency, not as a permanent state, but as a pause. A choice. A soft refusal to keep running simply because the treadmill is on.

I’m not advocating for mediocrity. I care deeply about teaching well, doing meaningful work, and being a good colleague. But I’ve come to realise that excellence and stillness are not opposites.

You can serve your students with integrity, fulfill your administrative roles, support your peers and still choose not to burn out in the process.

For me, that looks like small, deliberate acts of self-kindness. I try not to work at night. During my PhD, I worked every evening, always trying to squeeze out more from every day. Now, I do my best to finish by five or six. Then I watch completely mindless series. I read novels. I fold the laundry. I go to bed early. And those hours – the ones not spent striving – feel like a gift. A reclaiming.

I could probably push harder. There are more conferences I could attend, more papers I could submit, more roles I could put my hand up for. But I don’t want to. I value my time with my children. I care about my health. I cherish the quiet joy of a walk in the sun. Life is short. And I want to live it, not just optimise it.

I don’t often hear my colleagues say, out loud, that they want to stop striving. But I see it in their eyes. I hear it in the sighs over coffee. The sense that we are working so hard, all the time, and still wondering: is it enough?

And I think that’s where the kindness comes in.

To say: This is enough.
To say: I am enough.
To say: I don’t need to reinvent the wheel every semester to be a good teacher.
To say: I can sit at this point in my career without leaping toward the next.
To say: I can do good work and also rest.

Because, when internalised, the push to keep moving, keep producing, keep proving can become unkindness turned inward. It whispers that you are only as good as your next big surge. That quiet seasons are wasted ones. That standing still is falling behind.

But what if standing still is where the magic happens?

What if self-care isn’t just bubble baths and saying no to things, but also saying yes to being okay with where we are?

Academia doesn’t make this easy. It is a system built on scarcity and competition, where ambition is praised and rest is suspect. This post isn’t about dismantling that system, but about noticing the small spaces where we can choose differently.

To choose softness.
To choose stillness.
To choose kindness, even in complacency.

Especially in complacency.