Yeah dude the grind to try and get a tenure track job is soul-crushing. I put out over 1000 applications over the course of four years. I had about 15 interviews, 2 second round interviews, and at the end, no job. I can get adjunct work fairly easily, but it comes with no health insurance or stability, and it’s paid pretty badly. The adjunctification of higher ed has meant that a lot of otherwise good people have no future in academia, me being one of them. It sucks because I worked for fifteen years studying, teaching, and publishing on very some absolutely esoteric shit, and ended up with less job security and benefits than a Walmart employee. It took a lot of therapy, because this is the one thing I wanted to do with my life. But I know now that it’s time to move on, and that I can do good somewhere else if I get the right skills.