Why I Left Academia: Identity and Affective Positioning in Ex-Academics YouTube Narratives

The professional environment in all fields has been experiencing drastic transformations. The widespread shift to remote work during COVID-19, followed by a 2024 global recession reshaped attitudes toward work culture, which encouraged several employees to reassess its social, psychological, physical, and financial impact on their lives with a fresh insight. This created the phenomenon of The Great Resignation which is a term coined in 2021 by Anthony C. Klotz, and the term was resurfaced in 2025 as in The Great Re-Resignation. The two terms dominated several social media platforms and the news cycle, and the academic sphere was not immune to that social work trend. Some academics chose to permanently leave academia. The present study qualitatively analyzes the uncensored digital narratives of 18 US ex-academics (from 2020 until 2024) who talk about their experience in leaving academia. The analysis illustrates how these digital monologues depict the journey from academic to post-academic identities for the 18 ex-academics. Using the positioning framework by Giaxoglou and Georgakopoulou (2021), the study examines the narrative, discursive, and interactive tools that ex-academics use to construct their identity and affective positioning through YouTube narratives. It also shows how US ex-academics depict and evaluate the academic world through identity and affective positioning. Findings show how they moved from loving their academic roles to feeling burned out and disillusioned, eventually finding freedom in their new identities.