I appreciate your writing about the things I experienced in academia. I started writing about my graduate school experiences and those of my husband (in my Substack). When I got to the post that was supposed to be about interviewing at the AHA convention (like the MLA convention), I could not go on with my account of graduate school and its adjunct finish. After three one-year leave replacement jobs, my brilliant husband never worked again. He became an alcoholic. I can see now that I have not recovered enough to tell the whole story. I hope that I am not permanently damaged.
Thank you for sharing that. I'm still unlearning those habits of mind. As another reader noted in a thread last week, totalizing institutions really wreak havoc on us. Sending compassion and solidarity.
Muir - I think like all of us - cherished his time in the wilderness. Muir was an interesting character - his home in the Bay Area was a dark and dour place. He very likely represents our need for the wilderness and our simultaneous rejection of it in our social and cultural lives. The old Scotsman certainly landed in the right place to explore wilderness however.
Well said: "He very likely represents our need for the wilderness and our simultaneous rejection of it in our social and cultural lives." I suppose if we were to reconcile that contradiction, we might have abandoned the cultural invention known as "wilderness" and found ways of inhabiting places without colonizing them so thoroughly.
This essay is outstanding. My experience in graduate school was different--maybe because I’m a scientist--and was much more of a communal experience. Though no more healthy than what you describe! It was more like the Bachelor where contestants are constantly watching each other’s performance and comparing, and normal behavior gets more and more skewed.
Ah, well, that paradox of community and competition was certainly true for me, as well. It's possible that the humanities are more isolating, but I perhaps ought to have clarified that "Alone" reminds me of the *end* of graduate school, when we all began applying for jobs. I still consider many of my graduate school classmates as friends and comrades.
But you're right that the sciences ironically have a more humane culture at times than the so-called humanities. My dissertation was in the medical humanities and I team-taught a course twice with a Biology professor called "The Role of Imagination in Medicine." Our students were all pre-med -- all honors students -- and they embraced literature and medical history with more relish than many of the English majors I taught.
I'm a big fan of Wendell Berry. He is a little prone to nostalgia, but he has a realistic vision for sustainable communities. Many of my critiques of academe are variations on his.
I met some ex-pats in Costa Rica who seemed to be crashing from their escape fantasies after an alarmingly brief interval. If you don't mind me asking, what was the simple life you imagined and what was it really like?
Ah yes, Costa Rica. Definitely a destination for people with high hopes. I went there too, just to write about a community there, but I failed to sell the proposal. That was before Japan, you'd have thought I would have learned something. But I'm a slow learner. Here's my attempt to answer your question, sorry for the length:
When I was 39 years old, my wife and I decided to take a flying leap and move from New York City to rural Japan. For her, it was a chance to show our son his Japanese roots and teach him his mother’s native language. But for me it was something less practical: I wanted to live an more authentic life, connected to the land. Looking back now it’s a bit embarrassing, but I was trying to live out a back to the land fantasy that had been debunked a zillion times since the ‘70s.
We were living in Forest Hills, Queens and had some savings in the bank, but were treading water financially. Our son, Kazu, was five. Noriko was working long hours and my freelance copywriting job had just ended and I didn’t really feel like looking for more work.
I had volunteered at an organic farm a summer before in Nagano and was really taken with the mountains of Japan. But that had been an extended vacation. I didn’t realize how different an actual life in Japan is from a long visit until I tried it. I’m prone to this and given to escapist fantasy. Practically every place I visit feels like a great place to move to.
I got a job teaching in Gujo Hachiman, a small castle town in Gifu Prefecture. My plan was to teach and scout out farmhouses with the hope of buying one. I wanted to grow kabocha, Japanese pumpkins, because they’re delicious. Believe it or not, the idea of moving to the countryside of Japan to become a farmer is not as unique as it sounds. I soon encountered various men from Canada, the U.S., and Australia doing exactly that in the hidden valleys of Gifu.
There was Kajika Richard, so named because he lived in this gorgeous valley nearby in a very old farm house beside a river. His setup was so nice that I dreamed about it.
There was another Richard in Mino who tie-died shirts and sold them online. He smoked weed all day and talked a lot about his parents’ divorce, even though he was in his 40s. His wife supported the family.
There was another guy, whose name I forget now, who hand built a home in the mountains only to leave for Germany to join a Christian cult.
There was a really nice guy named James in Takayama who actually made it as a rice farmer. Of all the foreigners living out the farmer in Japan fantasy, he pulled it off. He didst’t spend much time with the rest of us. But we didn’t hang much with each other either.
To prepare for my life in the dirt, I rented a patch of land. I’d done a lot of gardening as a child in Michigan so I knew my way around. Here’s what I learned about growing things in Japan:
The soil is terrible. It’s nearly impossible without chemicals.
The insects are atrocious. The sub-tropical climate brings the bugs.
The weeds are very prolific.
The summer heat is brutal. The sun is punishing and the humidity is like the inside of a dog’s mouth.
I didn’t care for it.
Across from Kajika Richard’s farm was a Japanese farmer who’d been there for generations. He looked at us with pure bafflement. He often asked questions like, “Why did you come here?” “Why would you choose this life?” “Why don’t you hate farming? It’s horrible.”
One late summer day I was at Kajika Richard’s house. His ‘farm’ was a mess. The few vegetables that had survived the summer were spotted, rotten lumps. He picked two tomatoes and a single ear of corn, his only yield after months of work, from the thicket of weeds. He stuck them in a solar oven and smiled/winced.
“It’s always been my dream to harvest dinner straight from my yard.”
We looked at his house, both probably thinking the same thing. It would be absolutely freezing in a couple of months. No heat. No insulation. Just a wood stove that did nothing to fend off the cold. We looked at the farm, buzzing with insects. A dismal failure. The warmed up corn and tomatoes had cost this man two years of his life and at least a hundred thousand dollars worth of decrepit farmhouse.
A few months later, Richard fled for New Zealand after the tsunami in fear of a nuclear meltdown from the Fukushima plant a few hundred miles away. He left his dog tied up outside and bolted with his family. Neighbors eventually rescued the dog.
I stuck around for another year. I was there for three in total and we returned to New York. The thing I had hoped to find the most was a sense of realness in my life or a connectedness — maybe to nature or community, or the divine? Whatever authenticity is, that’s what I wanted.
But it wasn’t there for me. In fact, me trying to be a farmer in rural Japan and expecting to fit in somehow was maybe the least authentic way I’ve ever lived. My life is better back in NYC, for sure. And rather than find a more authentic way to live, something I still crave deep down, I’ve come to realize that virtually every way we live in this world is some form of cosplay.
I take it all less seriously now that I know that it’s futile to try to infuse lifestyle choices with a connection to what’s real in a spiritual sense.
Wow -- what a story. I admire your courage, even if it seems ill-advised in hindsight. I don't regret many of the leaps of faith I've taken in my life. Your point about wanting to move to the places you visit is interesting. I've never had that impulse, mainly because my emotional connection to the Pacific Northwest is deep, and I've found nowhere that compares to it. However, my return home in the summer during my college and graduate school years -- first as a wildland firefighter and later as a wilderness ranger -- was a form of that cosplay. I was working, to be sure, often in dirty conditions that others found unsavory. But I was also skimming the cream of the place. They say that Montana and Idaho are nine months winter and three months relatives, and I was basically getting paid to run around the mountains during the peak of their beauty. So when I say that the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is my spiritual home, I'm really thinking of those summers, not of what life would be like if my kids were in those rural schools or if I had to weather the economic scarcity of the area. In fact, the most rhapsodic nature writers are often those who have pulled off the escapist trick of bringing their NYC earnings to some wild place and then writing about saving it.
I have not solved the nostalgia puzzle for myself. It took me many years to embrace the Midwest as home (this is the end of my first book), and now that I have been recently uprooted again, I find my thoughts and daydreams going back to Montana and Idaho frequently. If I did not have children to check those impulses, I'd find them much harder to resist!
Those summers sound incredible! I want to read your book now. I grew up in Michigan and live in NYC now.
I'll bet your kids would love a trip to Montana, though you never know. My son never enjoyed camping the way I did. The last time I took him he was so over it that I started to see camping through his eyes. "Why am I sleeping on the ground in the woods?" But I still really love a hike through the woods.
By the way, I also loved Into the Wild and was moved by the tragic realization that came to him too late that other people are the source of love and meaning. I had a traveling troll tattooed on my arm because I was convinced I wanted to be a lifelong wanderer. After about a year on the road I realized that I needed to form bonds with people over time.
I really love substack, I feel ilke it's the first time I've seen such thoughtful, long form commentary about these matters since the early days of the internet. Thank you for your considered reply and wonderful post!
Sean, I agree with you about Substack. It has been a meaningful source of substantive conversation for me for the past year.
My three kiddos have all been to Montana before, and I'm slowly introducing them to camping. This summer will be our first trip since my youngest was a baby (he is 4 now), and I have an overnight hike planned, with good fishing as the reward at the end of the hike. I realize that it is, in some respects, a fiction. The lake is stocked by helicopter, and the trail is maintained by federal employees. But walking four miles into the woods, staring into a fire, and going to sleep with the smell of wood smoke in your clothes, is a meaningful ritual. My kids will never know "my Montana," but in many respects the land has not changed. Sharing that means imprinting something on them that overlaps with my most formative sense memories. Not a trivial matter!
America's rugged individualism culture has been the death of us: We have the most mass shootings, highest drug addiction and overdose rates, and most drunk driving accidents in the world. These aren't coincidences. But challenge rugged individualism? One will get shouted down quickly, as I have.
A couple trips to Europe opened my eyes. There was a feeling of helping one's fellow man and woman. I saw it in France, England, Ireland, and Denmark. When the tube entrance I was supposed to go to in London was closed for repairs, a barista walked me six blocks to show me where the next one was. She just told her manager, "I've got to help him" he nodded and we were on our way. I got lost in Paris, Dublin, and Copenhagen, each time people enthusiastically steered me in the right direction. This rarely has happened to me after a lifetime in the states.
Jeremiah Johnson was a folk hero among my north Idaho redneck classmates. They loved being detached from humanity, they used women as if they were toys, they bullied others because someone looked at them wrong. They sadistically trapped animals in the wild, some being alive stuck in traps for days ... and they laughed about it. They were barely human to me, but they loved ol' Jeremiah and what he and rugged individualism stood for. Me? I never liked it and I won't embrace it.
I've known people like that in rural Montana, but I've also known ethical hunters and people whose values are not so different from traditional "liberal" principles, such as growing your own food. If you saw my older post on the show Yellowstone, you know that I wrestle with how much these rural places that I love are defined by the most brutal aspects of them. Most of the people I've known in Idaho are wilderness types, and rugged individualism is alive and well among those with activist sensibilities. Show me a writer trying to save a place, and I'll show you an ego in isolation.
However, I did grow up with an abiding sense of community. Some of my favorite memories are of potlucks. There is something about religious extremism that brings out excellent cooking. The best potlucks I've ever attended were those that directly followed fire and brimstone sermons! My parents still belong to that kind of religious community, and I know that they really do look after their neighbors.
So there is a curious tension between the way people actually live in wild places and the mythologies that those same people still mysteriously support. I'm still not sure why people in my family so blindly reinforce the rugged individualist trope even as they live their lives in contradiction to it.
Even if there were no links or connections to grad school, I would find this essay to be shivery-good. But, and, I wonder whether the “go it alone” aspects of the TV series (and grad school)(and some people in the US) have a...fundamentally Whitened, White people element?
When I was finally accepted at one of the six PhD programs I’d applied to, I was admitted without funding. I asked how many had been admitted in total -- 12. Without funding? Only 2. “You can come and compete for funding!” the dept admin said brightly. That sounds...dreadful, I thought. And though I ended up getting accepted to another program (with funding), that perspective --and its objectifying brethren--compete! put yourself and be pitted against others! be badmouthed by women professors! be assessed as a sexual object by men professors!--permeated my grad school experience, job market, etc.
Glad the essay landed. We might need more space than a comment section to get at your first question. There is certainly a European strain of it, but I think the roots go back to the origins of the Abrahamic religions. See Lynn White Jr. on that subject (https://www.cmu.ca/faculty/gmatties/lynnwhiterootsofcrisis.pdf). The pretext for "Alone" jangles just as much with European paganism as it does with indigenous culture in North America.
Wow -- well said: "...that perspective --and its objectifying brethren--compete! put yourself and be pitted against others! be badmouthed by women professors! be assessed as a sexual object by men professors!--permeated my grad school experience, job market, etc." I recall a similar decision between two programs that offered funding. One was less generous and made me feel like I ought to be fawning with gratitude for having been accepted. The other, the University of Nebraska, gave me full funding and a feeling of mutual respect. It was not a difficult decision, but as you say, there was no escape from the mainstream culture once I ventured out from the program.
I appreciate your writing about the things I experienced in academia. I started writing about my graduate school experiences and those of my husband (in my Substack). When I got to the post that was supposed to be about interviewing at the AHA convention (like the MLA convention), I could not go on with my account of graduate school and its adjunct finish. After three one-year leave replacement jobs, my brilliant husband never worked again. He became an alcoholic. I can see now that I have not recovered enough to tell the whole story. I hope that I am not permanently damaged.
Thank you for sharing that. I'm still unlearning those habits of mind. As another reader noted in a thread last week, totalizing institutions really wreak havoc on us. Sending compassion and solidarity.
I hear you. I turned down graduate school and lit out for the territory. Spent years in the California Sierras studying John Muir. Nice write up!
Thanks! Curious if you see Muir as another study in isolation or if you find a vision for community in his work?
Muir - I think like all of us - cherished his time in the wilderness. Muir was an interesting character - his home in the Bay Area was a dark and dour place. He very likely represents our need for the wilderness and our simultaneous rejection of it in our social and cultural lives. The old Scotsman certainly landed in the right place to explore wilderness however.
Well said: "He very likely represents our need for the wilderness and our simultaneous rejection of it in our social and cultural lives." I suppose if we were to reconcile that contradiction, we might have abandoned the cultural invention known as "wilderness" and found ways of inhabiting places without colonizing them so thoroughly.
Seriously thinking about this at this moment. Thanks. Yosemite.
This essay is outstanding. My experience in graduate school was different--maybe because I’m a scientist--and was much more of a communal experience. Though no more healthy than what you describe! It was more like the Bachelor where contestants are constantly watching each other’s performance and comparing, and normal behavior gets more and more skewed.
Ah, well, that paradox of community and competition was certainly true for me, as well. It's possible that the humanities are more isolating, but I perhaps ought to have clarified that "Alone" reminds me of the *end* of graduate school, when we all began applying for jobs. I still consider many of my graduate school classmates as friends and comrades.
But you're right that the sciences ironically have a more humane culture at times than the so-called humanities. My dissertation was in the medical humanities and I team-taught a course twice with a Biology professor called "The Role of Imagination in Medicine." Our students were all pre-med -- all honors students -- and they embraced literature and medical history with more relish than many of the English majors I taught.
Fantastic! I moved to rural Japan at 40 to live out an imagined simple life. I met several foreigners like me in valleys living in old farmhouses.
None of us lasted more than a few years. That way of life is vanishing for real reasons.
I’m curious what you think of Wendell Berry?
I'm a big fan of Wendell Berry. He is a little prone to nostalgia, but he has a realistic vision for sustainable communities. Many of my critiques of academe are variations on his.
I met some ex-pats in Costa Rica who seemed to be crashing from their escape fantasies after an alarmingly brief interval. If you don't mind me asking, what was the simple life you imagined and what was it really like?
Ah yes, Costa Rica. Definitely a destination for people with high hopes. I went there too, just to write about a community there, but I failed to sell the proposal. That was before Japan, you'd have thought I would have learned something. But I'm a slow learner. Here's my attempt to answer your question, sorry for the length:
When I was 39 years old, my wife and I decided to take a flying leap and move from New York City to rural Japan. For her, it was a chance to show our son his Japanese roots and teach him his mother’s native language. But for me it was something less practical: I wanted to live an more authentic life, connected to the land. Looking back now it’s a bit embarrassing, but I was trying to live out a back to the land fantasy that had been debunked a zillion times since the ‘70s.
We were living in Forest Hills, Queens and had some savings in the bank, but were treading water financially. Our son, Kazu, was five. Noriko was working long hours and my freelance copywriting job had just ended and I didn’t really feel like looking for more work.
I had volunteered at an organic farm a summer before in Nagano and was really taken with the mountains of Japan. But that had been an extended vacation. I didn’t realize how different an actual life in Japan is from a long visit until I tried it. I’m prone to this and given to escapist fantasy. Practically every place I visit feels like a great place to move to.
I got a job teaching in Gujo Hachiman, a small castle town in Gifu Prefecture. My plan was to teach and scout out farmhouses with the hope of buying one. I wanted to grow kabocha, Japanese pumpkins, because they’re delicious. Believe it or not, the idea of moving to the countryside of Japan to become a farmer is not as unique as it sounds. I soon encountered various men from Canada, the U.S., and Australia doing exactly that in the hidden valleys of Gifu.
There was Kajika Richard, so named because he lived in this gorgeous valley nearby in a very old farm house beside a river. His setup was so nice that I dreamed about it.
There was another Richard in Mino who tie-died shirts and sold them online. He smoked weed all day and talked a lot about his parents’ divorce, even though he was in his 40s. His wife supported the family.
There was another guy, whose name I forget now, who hand built a home in the mountains only to leave for Germany to join a Christian cult.
There was a really nice guy named James in Takayama who actually made it as a rice farmer. Of all the foreigners living out the farmer in Japan fantasy, he pulled it off. He didst’t spend much time with the rest of us. But we didn’t hang much with each other either.
To prepare for my life in the dirt, I rented a patch of land. I’d done a lot of gardening as a child in Michigan so I knew my way around. Here’s what I learned about growing things in Japan:
The soil is terrible. It’s nearly impossible without chemicals.
The insects are atrocious. The sub-tropical climate brings the bugs.
The weeds are very prolific.
The summer heat is brutal. The sun is punishing and the humidity is like the inside of a dog’s mouth.
I didn’t care for it.
Across from Kajika Richard’s farm was a Japanese farmer who’d been there for generations. He looked at us with pure bafflement. He often asked questions like, “Why did you come here?” “Why would you choose this life?” “Why don’t you hate farming? It’s horrible.”
One late summer day I was at Kajika Richard’s house. His ‘farm’ was a mess. The few vegetables that had survived the summer were spotted, rotten lumps. He picked two tomatoes and a single ear of corn, his only yield after months of work, from the thicket of weeds. He stuck them in a solar oven and smiled/winced.
“It’s always been my dream to harvest dinner straight from my yard.”
We looked at his house, both probably thinking the same thing. It would be absolutely freezing in a couple of months. No heat. No insulation. Just a wood stove that did nothing to fend off the cold. We looked at the farm, buzzing with insects. A dismal failure. The warmed up corn and tomatoes had cost this man two years of his life and at least a hundred thousand dollars worth of decrepit farmhouse.
A few months later, Richard fled for New Zealand after the tsunami in fear of a nuclear meltdown from the Fukushima plant a few hundred miles away. He left his dog tied up outside and bolted with his family. Neighbors eventually rescued the dog.
I stuck around for another year. I was there for three in total and we returned to New York. The thing I had hoped to find the most was a sense of realness in my life or a connectedness — maybe to nature or community, or the divine? Whatever authenticity is, that’s what I wanted.
But it wasn’t there for me. In fact, me trying to be a farmer in rural Japan and expecting to fit in somehow was maybe the least authentic way I’ve ever lived. My life is better back in NYC, for sure. And rather than find a more authentic way to live, something I still crave deep down, I’ve come to realize that virtually every way we live in this world is some form of cosplay.
I take it all less seriously now that I know that it’s futile to try to infuse lifestyle choices with a connection to what’s real in a spiritual sense.
Wow -- what a story. I admire your courage, even if it seems ill-advised in hindsight. I don't regret many of the leaps of faith I've taken in my life. Your point about wanting to move to the places you visit is interesting. I've never had that impulse, mainly because my emotional connection to the Pacific Northwest is deep, and I've found nowhere that compares to it. However, my return home in the summer during my college and graduate school years -- first as a wildland firefighter and later as a wilderness ranger -- was a form of that cosplay. I was working, to be sure, often in dirty conditions that others found unsavory. But I was also skimming the cream of the place. They say that Montana and Idaho are nine months winter and three months relatives, and I was basically getting paid to run around the mountains during the peak of their beauty. So when I say that the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is my spiritual home, I'm really thinking of those summers, not of what life would be like if my kids were in those rural schools or if I had to weather the economic scarcity of the area. In fact, the most rhapsodic nature writers are often those who have pulled off the escapist trick of bringing their NYC earnings to some wild place and then writing about saving it.
I have not solved the nostalgia puzzle for myself. It took me many years to embrace the Midwest as home (this is the end of my first book), and now that I have been recently uprooted again, I find my thoughts and daydreams going back to Montana and Idaho frequently. If I did not have children to check those impulses, I'd find them much harder to resist!
Thanks for sharing so much of your story.
Those summers sound incredible! I want to read your book now. I grew up in Michigan and live in NYC now.
I'll bet your kids would love a trip to Montana, though you never know. My son never enjoyed camping the way I did. The last time I took him he was so over it that I started to see camping through his eyes. "Why am I sleeping on the ground in the woods?" But I still really love a hike through the woods.
By the way, I also loved Into the Wild and was moved by the tragic realization that came to him too late that other people are the source of love and meaning. I had a traveling troll tattooed on my arm because I was convinced I wanted to be a lifelong wanderer. After about a year on the road I realized that I needed to form bonds with people over time.
I really love substack, I feel ilke it's the first time I've seen such thoughtful, long form commentary about these matters since the early days of the internet. Thank you for your considered reply and wonderful post!
Sean, I agree with you about Substack. It has been a meaningful source of substantive conversation for me for the past year.
My three kiddos have all been to Montana before, and I'm slowly introducing them to camping. This summer will be our first trip since my youngest was a baby (he is 4 now), and I have an overnight hike planned, with good fishing as the reward at the end of the hike. I realize that it is, in some respects, a fiction. The lake is stocked by helicopter, and the trail is maintained by federal employees. But walking four miles into the woods, staring into a fire, and going to sleep with the smell of wood smoke in your clothes, is a meaningful ritual. My kids will never know "my Montana," but in many respects the land has not changed. Sharing that means imprinting something on them that overlaps with my most formative sense memories. Not a trivial matter!
America's rugged individualism culture has been the death of us: We have the most mass shootings, highest drug addiction and overdose rates, and most drunk driving accidents in the world. These aren't coincidences. But challenge rugged individualism? One will get shouted down quickly, as I have.
A couple trips to Europe opened my eyes. There was a feeling of helping one's fellow man and woman. I saw it in France, England, Ireland, and Denmark. When the tube entrance I was supposed to go to in London was closed for repairs, a barista walked me six blocks to show me where the next one was. She just told her manager, "I've got to help him" he nodded and we were on our way. I got lost in Paris, Dublin, and Copenhagen, each time people enthusiastically steered me in the right direction. This rarely has happened to me after a lifetime in the states.
Jeremiah Johnson was a folk hero among my north Idaho redneck classmates. They loved being detached from humanity, they used women as if they were toys, they bullied others because someone looked at them wrong. They sadistically trapped animals in the wild, some being alive stuck in traps for days ... and they laughed about it. They were barely human to me, but they loved ol' Jeremiah and what he and rugged individualism stood for. Me? I never liked it and I won't embrace it.
I've known people like that in rural Montana, but I've also known ethical hunters and people whose values are not so different from traditional "liberal" principles, such as growing your own food. If you saw my older post on the show Yellowstone, you know that I wrestle with how much these rural places that I love are defined by the most brutal aspects of them. Most of the people I've known in Idaho are wilderness types, and rugged individualism is alive and well among those with activist sensibilities. Show me a writer trying to save a place, and I'll show you an ego in isolation.
However, I did grow up with an abiding sense of community. Some of my favorite memories are of potlucks. There is something about religious extremism that brings out excellent cooking. The best potlucks I've ever attended were those that directly followed fire and brimstone sermons! My parents still belong to that kind of religious community, and I know that they really do look after their neighbors.
So there is a curious tension between the way people actually live in wild places and the mythologies that those same people still mysteriously support. I'm still not sure why people in my family so blindly reinforce the rugged individualist trope even as they live their lives in contradiction to it.
Even if there were no links or connections to grad school, I would find this essay to be shivery-good. But, and, I wonder whether the “go it alone” aspects of the TV series (and grad school)(and some people in the US) have a...fundamentally Whitened, White people element?
When I was finally accepted at one of the six PhD programs I’d applied to, I was admitted without funding. I asked how many had been admitted in total -- 12. Without funding? Only 2. “You can come and compete for funding!” the dept admin said brightly. That sounds...dreadful, I thought. And though I ended up getting accepted to another program (with funding), that perspective --and its objectifying brethren--compete! put yourself and be pitted against others! be badmouthed by women professors! be assessed as a sexual object by men professors!--permeated my grad school experience, job market, etc.
Glad the essay landed. We might need more space than a comment section to get at your first question. There is certainly a European strain of it, but I think the roots go back to the origins of the Abrahamic religions. See Lynn White Jr. on that subject (https://www.cmu.ca/faculty/gmatties/lynnwhiterootsofcrisis.pdf). The pretext for "Alone" jangles just as much with European paganism as it does with indigenous culture in North America.
Wow -- well said: "...that perspective --and its objectifying brethren--compete! put yourself and be pitted against others! be badmouthed by women professors! be assessed as a sexual object by men professors!--permeated my grad school experience, job market, etc." I recall a similar decision between two programs that offered funding. One was less generous and made me feel like I ought to be fawning with gratitude for having been accepted. The other, the University of Nebraska, gave me full funding and a feeling of mutual respect. It was not a difficult decision, but as you say, there was no escape from the mainstream culture once I ventured out from the program.