Chaotic Good

I’m immensely fond of Masterchef AU. The show started in my second-to-last year of high school when actually living in Australia hadn’t even crossed my mind. Now it makes for an island of wholesome content in the middle of the annual reality TV carousel, nestled between the post-Christmas pantomime drama of ‘Married at First Sight’ and the equal parts mawkish and romantic ‘Bachelor’ franchise in it’s various incarnations.

The general premise, for the uninitiated, is home cooks turning out food that wouldn’t look out of place in the kind of restaurant you only ever get to visit with someone’s obscenely rich lab PI. It’s hard to look at Masterchef AU food without having war flashbacks to the time the new honours student took your bread roll because they didn’t know theirs was the one to the left, causing no end of bread-related disaster before the starter even arrived.

In a year where we collectively yearned for feel-good nostalgia, Masterchef AU managed to hit the spot by bringing back much-loved contestants from previous seasons, and that really irritating meat guy in the fedora who ruined every group challenge he touched. If you know, you know. Anyway, enter fan favourites Reynold Poernomo and Poh Ling Yeow (we will discuss Laura and her pasta another time).

My two moods on a zoom call

If you want to talk about character archetypes, ‘Poh’ and ‘Reynold’ are classics. Every time Poh cooked in the Masterchef AU kitchen (bar like, one episode where she actually got a grip), it was absolute chaos. I am sure there are camera tricks at play, but 90% of the time she ran dangerously close to not having anything to put on a plate. Even this spectacular cake thing - which probably tastes like unicorn farts and rainbows - was a deadset disaster from the start until about 30 seconds before the end of the challenge.

Like well-applied makeup, edible flowers are a thin veneer on the raging tumult below

Reynold, on the other hand, was the opposite. I’m pretty sure there is not a single action Reynold made in the whole damn series that was not methodically planned out and practiced beforehand. He is the epitome of the concept of ‘measure twice and cut once’ (aside from that one challenge where the producers did everything they could to make him cry). Reynold not only cooked his food but probably also had factored in time to do the dishes and put them away at the end.

It takes a special kind of person to make moss look appetizing

But here’s the thing: both were comparatively successful. Poh may have flown close to the sun on many occasions, but most of the time it worked out in the last 30-60 seconds of the challenge. And it’s hard to say that Reynold ever ‘played it safe’ - it was undoubtedly much more of a swan gliding on the surface of a lake kind of illusion.

I’m sure you know a Poh, and a Reynold. They’re probably sitting in an office down the hall from you now (virtually, anyway, for non-antipodean friends). Hell, you may even be a Poh or a Reynold yourself. I, myself, am a dyed-in-the-wool Poh. My entire PhD involved me throwing as many things at the wall as I could to see what would stick. And people only tend to remember the things that did work out. Take the chiffon cake above: it looks magnificent despite taking 3 times as much work as it should have done, with a healthy side serving of panic when the damn thing wouldn’t cook fast enough. I have also known Reynolds. Academics who formulate a detailed plan and then execute it. I admire the unflinching confidence of Reynolds - it must take a special kind of absence of childhood trauma to trust that plans will eventuate.

Just as real life is not like the movies, real life is not like reality TV. Character archetypes may inform but stick too closely to them and you set yourself up for failure. As a Poh, I have trouble sticking to research with a long term plan. I can feel myself becoming unfocussed. Not to mention the delicious slice of burnout I was served at the beginning of 2019 that I am still struggling to finish off (think pub portions rather than a dainty Masterchef AU bite). On the other hand, when something goes wrong, it’s easy to improvise. Reynolds may become completely unseated by a roadblock or unexpected result that cannot be planned for, but long term planning tends to avoid the all-in finish that contributes to burn out. You need a healthy amount of both to succeed, and if you naturally lean to one side rather than the other you may need to course correct.

Which brings back the perfect framing device for academic character archetypes. The DnD alignment chart has been a meme for at least as long as I’ve been on the internet, although it has probably had a bit of renewed popularity over the last 18 months. I have enjoyed watching colleagues and friends ascribe themselves into the different personality and ethical alignments, but occasionally it’s given me a bit of pause. Take the above example of ‘Chaotic Productive’. I wonder if we do our students a disservice when we proudly proclaim ourselves ‘Chaotic Productive’, especially those of us who are mentors and supervisors (for the record, I am definitely Chaotic Neutral).

I think it is important that we are honest about the methods that work for us, but it has to come with a side serve of self-awareness, and also asking ourselves whether we truly are being productive and happy working random assortments of hours for 80 hours a week. It is easy to be dragged into the archetype of the devoted, eccentric academic, but it’s also important not to drag our students with us unwittingly. I don’t think the ‘chaotic productive’ types bear any malice, but it’s worth saying that this isn’t a sustainable strategy for most people. After a hell of a year, I think most of us will have arrived at the end of the tunnel with a grain more self awareness and compassion than we started with.