Yet this skill is never taught. So in actual fact what he’s saying is “studies filter out the people who can’t learn stress resilience by themselves”
A close friend was a nueroscientist. I got to watch her PI push her into 70 hour weeks and then guilt trip her for not doing more. I watched her PI extend her PhD for a year so she could contribute more to other projects, and then I watched them selectively drop data (and IMO make up results) so that they could publish on schedule.
Some parts of academia are so ludicrously bureaucratic that folks literally focus on box ticking for years at a time. That’s bound to happen because beaurocracy forces a path of least resistance that is essentially box ticking.
Is this a healthy skill to have, e.g. not stressing about things you can't control, learning not to be perfectionist, and adopting a healthy attitude as to what is or is not realistic?
Or is this emotional repression and chemical coping? Burying feelings of being overloaded, disrespected, having your needs ignored, and turning to alcohol, cannabis, nicotine, etc. to get through it?
Because depending on what it is, I'm not sure it's a "skill" I want to have. I've gone through very stressful periods of my professional life (in all cases caused primarily by mismanagement above me), and while I got through them, they only did harm, not good. There was nothing to "learn" from them. In no way did they make me a better person. They just took unnecessary tolls on my health and happiness, and even relationships.
That's interesting, in my second semester (Physics) a professor said to us in his introduction lecture that one of the biggest things you learn during studies is stress resilience. There's definitely a lot of truth to that. Although back at the time I didn't realize it but looking back it was the case. During studies and also 1-2 years afterwards I got incredibly resilient to stress.
No matter how much I had to do or how bad an incoming news was, I was just thinking, oh yeah now I need to do this, this and this or okay, that's just how it is, cannot do something about it. But yeah, the bill comes years after when you realize how you couldn't maintain any relationship that is not super close to you.
I wish people designing university programs but also those giving advise, would remove some of the pressure and also make the programs less intense (or at least longer with the same amount of things). As you mentioned, apart from very specific university career tracks there is little usage for many of those hard earned skills and tricks.