I normally don't write journal entries on DA as I am more-or-less a nobody to my (small-ish number of) watchers here. But here goes...

A bit of intro: I am a research scientist in the field of neural development, my area of interest is how growing nerve cell processes ('axons') find their way to connect to their correct target areas. It is a cool topic of intense interest (I mean who wouldn't want to figure out how the brain is wired, or how to make a spinal cord injury patient stand again?)---but like everything worthy, with intense interest comes intense competition. Competition for everything basically: getting results published in scientific journals before your competitors, getting research grants, and for us lowly postdocs, getting lab-head positions so that you can set up your own shop. It has never been easy and is becoming increasingly less so, like all things with limited resources. I am sure this is not unique to the bioscience workfield, with the ecomony in the shitter in so many places, job security has become something of a myth. The point is, no matter which field you work in, to stay afloat has become quite the struggle.

Anyway back on topic...what do I mean by 'the issue of guilt' in the title? Well, as we're on DA here, drawing is at least a semi-serious hobby to most of us, and surely we all put effort into improving skill and getting an idea drawn.  I've been looking at my submissions---most if not all were done in 2007 or 2008. These were dark times during grad school for me, and by 2008 I started giving a lot less of a fuck---hence the ample amounts of free time dedicated to drawing. Since 2008 a lot of things had happened and now I do give a lot of fucks about my work. And suddenly I don't 'have time' to draw. But seriously, why did drawing take such a backseat? I certainly had tons of time to goof off on the internet.

It is not an issue of time management, it is an issue of guilt.

Drawing takes quite an effort. Working takes quite an effort. We have limited amounts of effort to dispense. To stay afloat at work, it's best to put forth our energy to work stuff, no? If I'm going to spend effort, if this block of time is not allocated to mindless relaxation like surfing the internet or playing video games, then it'd better be spent on something that counts, like work. So then there's this intense guilt for drawing instead of reading papers or analysing data, and then I end up surfing the internet all night.

I sort of see the same thing here with several young DA artists who took the professional artist road. Once they enter art school, their submissions are pretty much replaced with school work instead of fun fan art or crazy OCs. Don't get me wrong, the quality of their art of course skyrockets once they're in art school----but something just makes me a bit sad: it seems like once in art school they get so swamped with work that they don't draw for fun anymore! It might be the same guilt thing that I'm going through.

Just a lament, just a mini-rant. What does the economy/job security/competiton have anything to do with this? Probably not that much. But in this economy, in this day and age of competition, I'd better be honing work skills and polishing my CV instead of doodling, huh. And this doesn't help with the guilt whenever I think of drawing something. I wonder if anyone has a good way to overcome this.