Why I quit my academic job to study photography

This article was originally posted Bron Eager’s Journal blog in March 2026, and can still be found there. We have republished it because Bron has written about an important issue in a clear and evocative way. We have republished it here under the under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, with the permission of Bron Eager. Photo by Ljubomir Žarković on Unsplash People often imagine life-changing career decisions as a single dramatic moment: a sudden epiphany, a bold declaration, a clean break. My decision to quit my academic job and step away from my work in artificial intelligence (AI) training was nothing like that. The truth is that the moment had been building for years. It started as a quiet, persistent feeling – something niggling at the edges of my consciousness. A sense that something wasn’t quite right. That despite professional success, despite recognition, despite doing work that many people would consider exciting and meaningful, I wasn’t…