Restlessness

This post will probably mean more to me than it means to any of you dear readers. But maybe someone will recognize a bit of themselves in it. Or maybe I’m underestimating how common this sentiment is. It won’t take long to type out, so it’s worth a shot.

There’s a restless instinct that makes one want to abandon recent success and move on to something new.

I don’t know how shared this sentiment is, but it is certainly not unique. I remember when Josh Trachtenberg told me that Karel Svoboda told him (JT) that he (KS) was “going to wind down all of the in vivo dendritic spine imaging work in the lab” within the next year or so. That’s the subfield Josh, Karel, Wen-Biao Gan and others had just started together. Josh was a brand new assistant professor at UCLA at the time, after having just published a landmark paper on chronic in vivo imaging of dendritic spines with Karel. It was fascinating to see this hidden world they revealed through longitudinal dendritic spine imaging: synapses popping in and out of existence day-to-day. And Karel was just going wind it down shortly after getting it going? It was jarring to me. There were certainly many more landmark papers to be written in the subfield (and people like Wen-Biao Gan did just that). So it was jarring. But also relatable. There was something in that maneuver that I identified with.

Some people run their careers laser focused on a narrow area, and there is great power in that approach.

Other people are restless and find different ways to have impact from project to project.

Sometimes students ask me about my career path. I don’t think my story is very useful– survivor bias and all that– but I try to make it entertaining at least. I sometimes describe the common thread through my career decisions as a flight from potential boredom. Said another way, it is simply restlessness. I’m writing this up now because I’m feeling it again. I want to abandon some of our recent success and move on to something new. Maybe you can relate to that.