Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. Stephanie is the Vice President of Marketing at Silverchair.

Recently, I was having lunch with a researcher friend and we were lamenting the new type of mental load that comes from oscillating between everyday considerations (things like watering the plants), the workday aspects of our lives (going to that meeting, writing that blog), and large-scale crises like the dissolution of funding for the underpinnings of our industry. She termed the dizzying pivots “horizon-shifting.”  

The constant mental switching between these realms brings with it a new kind of exhaustion. On one hand, our worlds don’t exist outside of any of these vantages. The minutiae of our daily lives both ground us and also keep the wheels turning in those seemingly small moments that end up comprising much of our actual lives.  

At the same time, we need to make a living. For many of us in this industry, the work we perform is also driven by larger missions and by our motivations to support research and science to the benefit of the world at large.  

Yet even that work can seem small when simultaneously civil liberties that were fought for over decades disappear, infrastructure that seemed all but assumed are dismantled, and established business models crumble as the organizational pillars for that funding are dissolved. 

In sum, it’s exhausting to be a human in modern-day scholarly publishing. (Substitute “scholarly publishing” for pretty much anything, honestly.)  

Of course, this phenomenon is small and fleeting when considering the code switching that many have had to do their entire lives as people of color or other diverse identities (Are we still allowed to say “diverse”?). 

Still, as a parent and as a human, I currently find the “distractions” of the small areas of my daily life both baffling and relieving. Sorry, I’m supposed to keep track of spirit week themes and buy toilet paper and pay my HOA fees while all this (*gestures at everything*) is going on?  

And yet, the immediacy of these aspects provides an escape from the dystopia we seem to be living in. For me, the small acts and rituals are grounding and offer chances for direct connection to other humans on a more visceral level. You roll your eyes with a fellow parent over a last-minute “glow in the dark” day (I wish I were kidding), you go into a deep dive on Jiffy Pop with the grocery store cashier, you talk about the best flowering trees with a neighbor (find me at the SSP meeting to happily discuss all this and more).  

At the same time, we also need day jobs, and many found ourselves drawn to the industry of scholarly publishing because of the missions that drive it. We like doing work that feels connected to a larger purpose. The details of what we do on a day-to-day basis may be small. We edit that paper, we complete that ticket, we go to that Zoom call (…and that other Zoom call, and another one, and…).  

In the aggregate, however, these tasks can add up to work that really does serve to fuel the scholarly endeavor and support research and discovery. On various levels, we’re striving toward the sharing and advancement of knowledge alongside similarly motivated colleagues. That’s no small feat, and yet every small action we do feels like it’s rowing slowly but steadily in that direction.   

Then of course there’s the wider scale. Perhaps because of the same drivers that attracted us to this industry in the first place, many of us also feel compelled to engage with larger scale issues—especially the ones that are directly and increasingly disrupting the work we do on a daily basis (and not the cool, innovator, start-up kind of disruption). 

Here’s where I will admit to being someone who, earlier this year, wanted to take a head-in-the-sand approach, purely for survival purposes. The fire from the last round felt replaced by defeat, and I wanted to just channel what energy I had into raising a mess of kids (a “mess” being the plural noun for four boys) and simply maintain some semblance of mental health over the next four years.  

And yet. Family members fear for their jobs as government employees. Friends whose work is funded by grants are having projects canceled or seeing early layoffs as funding is cut. It’s simply not possible to take a fingers-in-the-ears approach to the changes in our world (note that this approach also doesn’t work with the aforementioned children).  

These are not normal times. This is a time where we are all navigating new ways of being, new ways of shifting our horizons on an hourly and daily basis. It’s a time to give grace to one another, leaning into the strange wisdom that the pandemic imparted, which is the ability to see each other as full humans, ones who are navigating constantly changing circumstances.   

It’s a flawed and impossible task, but we’re not the first to live through such tumultuous times. There can be solace and inspiration and grounding in revisiting the very research we support. There’s comfort and solidarity in small day-to-day connections with our communities. 

After all, it’s a tough time to be a human. It’s a tough time to care about research. It’s a tough time to try and write articles without completely falling apart in parentheses. But there’s always hope on the horizon.