I feel a lot of pressure

Since getting my PhD and, to an extent, during graduate school, I’ve felt a lot of pressure to produce innovative and strong work. Some of my outputs have not been accepted by the general public as being publishable or viable and that’s okay. It seems that what is deemed publishable and useful nowadays requires an immense amount of luck and patience and specialization within a certain field. I have time for that. Yet, I feel an immense amount of pressure as a creative to produce. It wears me down on a conssitent basis and I don’t feel that I have a viable solution to this. I interpret my work to constantly be subpar, partly because there’s no one else to compare myself to at this stage of the game. I just need to improvise a future going forward. 

Truth be told, I don’t really know how academics do it. It’s a long and arduous path and one full of self discovery and significant life changes for the better and for the worse. I don’t really know what’s going to happen with architecture. Did that really just happen because I got off my medications for a bit during last winter and had a brief delusional episode? Or was everything grounded in reality like it always seems it is. I don’t really know the answer to that. It’s interesting because the incentive structure in academia is set up to seem to favor those who take shortcuts. It advantages those who are able to get away with doing more with less effort and maximize their CV. I’m not really that type of worker. I value quality but, at the same time, I don’t really know if that’s what I’m getting either.