When I quit my PhD - by John Aiken - Low Impact Fruit

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When I quit my PhD

John Aiken<br>Apr 19, 2026

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I woke up, somewhat nervous. It was a warm, April Saturday. Typically my PhD adviser had not invited me for meeting outside of work. Much less on a Saturday. I decided to wear a grey button down shirt, black jeans, and suspenders. I had recently had some idea that I should start wearing suspenders, that suspenders would some how establish my hipster identity, and that today of all days was the day when I should get started. I thought maybe I should look nice, and recently I had decided to get out more, so I decided that I could go walk around the city after my meeting. Walk through the forests that populated the city center, or the Saturday flea markets, or maybe just sit in a pub and enjoy myself. I had earned it, I had done nothing that week to work towards my PhD, but I had convinced myself that the emotional labour I put into my PhD was enough. I deserved a weekend. I arrived at the cafe and my PhD adviser was already there. I could tell he wasn’t exactly happy with me, I had known this for some time. For whatever reasons, we didn’t get along. He wanted this of me, I wanted that of him, and we never seemed to see eye to eye. I still attempted to produce research, but it always felt like the wheels were spinning and the car was never going anywhere. But mud was everywhere. But it wasn’t my mud. In that moment I was sure of that.<br>It’s not working out, I heard my PhD adviser say. Maybe if I had spent more time building the software library, but the software library hadn’t been built. Maybe if my focus on research had found some profound result the lack of production on the software library wouldn’t had been such a big deal. It didn’t matter that I had built three different versions, nobody was using it and so it had been a failure. And so far the spatio-temporal variability of the power law distributions I had been calculating were less than profound. They were mostly boring. We both seemed to be at a loss as to how to publish any of this work. My PhD adviser let out a deep sigh and sat quietly thinking of what to say next. It wasn’t working, something needs to change. We both knew that, but to be honest I wasn’t ready for what came next. That was April.

The January view from outside my bedroom window. We had a bottom floor apartment, but it was 90 sq m, 700 euros/month including bills split 3 ways, and a private garden. I always seem to remember moments, not things or ideas. That flat was a moment.<br>In January of the same year, prior to the April meeting, I attempted suicide. It’s kind of a funny story, I don’t really think about it as being a big deal. I tried hanging myself. But I didn’t really put that much effort into it. I had thought about it and did some kind of trial runs and this one I decided would be the real go for it. I would hang myself with a belt from my loft bed. I thought, what better way to do it than to do it on purpose, knowing that I could just end it all because it was my choice, not because I had set up some contraption that I couldn’t escape. Now it seems so silly. First, I can’t believe I was ever in the mindset that I could leave my dead body for my poor roommates to find. Not that they wouldn’t recover, but still, what a lack of empathy for the people around me. Second, science is not THAT important, and there I was, hanging from my loft bed from a belt around my neck, hoping that my vision was actually getting dark from the sides and it wasn’t just my melodramatic nature, creating a cinematic vision. I’m pretty sure it was just melodrama. Sometimes when you think about memories you think, is this even really what happened? Have I told myself this story so many times I created a fiction? It is a slippery slope to thinking you have no right to feel anything at all.<br>After hanging there for a while I got bored waiting to die. It’s so ridiculous, I got bored with my own death! The whole plan was that I would have the will power to see myself through, but so far this plan had made it easy to circumvent. So I got myself down and sat wondering what to do next. My neck was rather sore but I knew that if I just sat in the house I might as well die. It was still January and too cold to simply go for a stroll. So while mindlessly scrolling my email on my phone I noticed an email for a meetup.com group for karaoke that met on Saturdays in the city. Thinking, “why not?” I walked out of my flat and went straight to the train. Well, I got a beer on the way. It’s nice to live in a country that lets you walk on the side walk with a beer. I recommend trying it out. I sat on the train with my beer wondering if I would talk to anyone at all at this karaoke thing but at least I was out of the house. Trees turned to houses which turned to town homes and apartments and rivers and bridges as I crossed the city on the train.

I feel like this picture captures...