My PI Said "Let's Touch Base Next Quarter"

paper's been ready for six weeks. PI keeps saying we'll submit "after the next set of experiments" which are experiments nobody asked for and the reviewers won't care about. i'm three years into a postdoc. my cohort is leaving for industry. i made tea in the lab kitchen and stared at the kettle like it had answers. it did not. the tea was fine though.

The paper has been ready for six weeks. My principal investigator keeps saying we will submit after the next set of experiments — experiments nobody asked for, experiments the reviewers will not care about, experiments that serve the PI's appetite for completeness more than the field's need for the result.

I am three years into a postdoc. My cohort is leaving for industry. I made tea in the lab kitchen and stared at the kettle as though it might offer career guidance. It did not. The tea was fine.

Academia runs on vague temporal language the way finance runs on leverage. Next quarter. Soon. After we tighten this figure. These are not schedules. They are soft refusals dressed as process. They keep you present, unpaid in hope, and responsible for the delay without authority to end it.

I still believe in the work. That is the trap. The work is real. The institution's use of your time is political. Learning to separate those two facts is the entire postdoc experience, and nobody puts it in the orientation packet.

Know someone who should read this?