My personal views and my research work kind of collide. What can I do? Climate change and mass extinctions are happening, so in my private life, I try to be as sustainable as possible. For example, I eat almost exclusively organic vegetarian food, I have no car, buy most stuff used, have a renewable energy contract and avoid flying (especially intercontinentally).
But when I look at my professional life, it is a different story: I am doing my PhD at an institute, working on a side branch of microelectronics. Our institute reportedly uses the amount of electricity in a year that is comparable to a city of 25,000 people. While certainly a lot of what we are developing might end up being useful, other developments aren't leaving the prototype stage once a project is finished. We produce a huge amount of electronic waste on the way to success and other not very sustainable stuff is happening along the way, too.
My dilemma is that I really enjoy working there. I love my colleagues, my supervisor is great, the work is challenging, but extremely interesting. I have a lot of freedom and support, and a good career outlook. And: I am really good at what I do. I published papers and I built a great network.
But on the other hand, I really question the need to integrate electronics everywhere. I cannot really stand behind a lot of what I/we do and the unsustainable practices in our industry. To make matters worse, we even sometimes work on projects for the military — which goes totally against my political beliefs — but the projects themselves are interesting and fun to research.
I am really torn between what my personal beliefs are and what I do at my work / during my research. I try to convince myself that what I do is ok because it is better to have critical people working on a topic, that aren't afraid to question the necessity of new developments, than just the ones who blindly think everything is great. But this sometimes feels like I am gaslighting myself into thinking that what I do is great, even though I know in my heart that it is (kind of) wrong.
What are strategies to deal with this, apart from changing careers (because that train has kind of left the station)?
The fact that some projects lead nowhere is natural to research. That is not &quot;wastage&quot;, it's investment. If something works, it can be scaled up and benefit humankind. You can try and concentrate on projects where, if successful, it will save energy, optimize water, etc.
I suggest it is legitimate to waste material and energy to develop these to viable directions, because it will save orders of magnitude more than you waste now. So, I do not necessarily see a contradiction in finding good topics that correlate with your lifestyle/philosophy.
As for defense research, that's quite a different matter. If you really do not believe in defense work, there is no way you can justify to yourself to do it. To take the advocatus diaboli: some people may say that it is in the nature of things that there are less than friendly actors around in the world; neutral and even friendly relations can sour to a point where it is essential to have the country you generally agree to live in the military option at least in the hope that its use will not be necessary.
But if you are strictly opposed to this, either as fundamental principle of non-violence, or because you believe that with all lofty aspirations, the military-industrial complex and/or the political echelon has too many ulterior motives, then I do not see a possibility to reconcile your private beliefs with defense-related work.
The argument of people effectively supporting an activity they fundamentally disagree with by offering a &quot;critical&quot; perspective is not something you can easily get away with, unless you live in a dictatorship and have no reasonably good other choices. And there, being &quot;critical&quot; means being subversive.
To use a similar picture: If you like the taste of steaks and want to protect animals, there is a contradiction; unfortunately, that means that the best you can do at this point are vegan steak replacements. The ones I know are so yucky that it's better to identify genuinely vegan food that does not pretend it's something else.
Standing up to principles requires sacrifice - not always, but more often than not.