Before I joined the IRRITATION team in late February of 2025, I had been angry, sad and frustrated for the most part of the last previous months, but little did I know I was about to have a crash course in irritation, too. Struggling to finish my master's thesis, continuous struggles in personal life, and suddenly cut out of student support by the state, I did not expect to find myself graduated and determined five months later. Here, I attempt to understand what happened through some reflections of my irritations.
2025 did not start great for me. I ran out of support months as a student, and the fact that my thesis work had been slowed down by death of two loved ones within the year I had started to work on it was not a good enough reason to extend it. Throughout my masters’ I had been unable to get the support I needed by the overwhelmed student health services, and now the job market too was as inviting as storming the beaches of Normandy. Add to the equation the on-going crises of democracy and humanity around the world and you might get a picture why I was having trouble pushing myself to the limit to finish the thesis despite having completed my fieldwork the year before. When after months of trying to find a job my dear family dog Amigo died the day before I interviewed for this job, it really felt the universe was trying to send a signal – save yourself the trouble and stop trying.
Miraculously, however, I did get the job despite showing up teared up on the inside. I was hired as a research assistant to help with the project’s data collection. I started with getting myself acquainted with the project fast, translating all the experiment materials to Finnish, building a system through which to get people signed up for the study and designing posters. Once all this was done I moved on to the most important phase of my time in the project, which was to recruit and conduct a study for one hundred adults and one hundred kids. By the end I had also gotten the chance to conduct and transcribe interviews, analyze films and dabble into some light ethnographic research like participant observation. Along with these exciting opportunities that allowed me to practice the skills I had developed over my studies also came a supportive working environment that supported me in getting my thesis done on the side.
While I waited outside of the lab for each of the participants to finish the study one after another, I got ample time to not only overthink everything about my thesis but also to reflect on how despite all the messy emotions for the past few months, irritation had not been on the top of my list. This was a vivid contradiction to the fact that I would classify myself as an easily irritated person, and growing up close to my brothers and cousins I have certainly done more than my fair share of irritating, too.
I get irritated when people walk slowly in front of me, when the train escapes right in front of my eyes, and when I am talked over. At the same time, however, I usually do not easily show feelings of irritation – if you know me well, you feel it radiating from me, but to express my irritation explicitly is a rare thing indeed. More often than I recognize being irritated, in fact, I fear that I am irritating others, and as I stopped to think about it, I found that most of my self-regulation was done on the basis of trying to not irritate those around me. Irritation was clearly a common emotion in my life despite not recognizing it over the last few months of sorrow and frustration. And yet, it would inform my next few months more than I could have ever imagined.
Turns out that Finnish students really, really did not want to participate in a study. I messaged every student organization and had them post the invitation to participate in our study on mailing lists, social and media; I put up hundreds of posters and flyers all around the campus; I went to speak to around 30 huge lectures and hundreds of students, asking them to consider contributing towards the science. On good days I could scrap together one or two students from all of these hundreds of people I contacted. When getting to 60 participants had taken two months, I was about to throw in the towel for a moment.
What turned my frustration into irritation was that this should not have been surprising at all – rather, it was in line with my experiences over my studies. In all our courses the feedback from students was a sense of frustration with sticking to the level of abstract - why do we sit here in the classroom talking about this when anthropology is supposed to be an embodied field? - and yet the struggle to get these same students engaged with an on-going anthropological study was ever-present.
The same system was paralleled in the institutional side of it. With all the talk about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, it often felt like some people were actively looking for a reason to refuse co-operation. All I asked for was to share an invitation to some course pages of topics relating to the study, for the students to participate voluntarily if they so wanted – no emails, no notifications or disturbances to students or teaching, easy to ignore and no benefits or punishments for participating or not participating. Based on some of the exchanges I had, asking this was outrageous to even suggest.
Here, I can admit, I got irritated. Extremely so.
Having given this difficulty of finding volunteers a lot of thought over the last few months, I would argue it is a combination of several things.
The simple one is the combination of compensation and time. When you’re a student balancing your burnout from the semester with the burnout of either not having a summer vacation or anxiety of not having gotten a summer job, 5 euros to a local coffee shop might not inspire you to participate. In fact, when I was talking with a fellow anthropology student and mentioned that the kids who participated in the study got stickers as a reward, their immediate response was “I’d rather have the sticker, too”. The value of five euros is less than a cute sticker for a student trying to negotiate their value of time, money and mental health.
The more nuanced explanation is connected to the enormous pressure to graduate in time as the student benefit months run out fast, and the student loan needed to live in Helsinki needs to be paid. Students do not have 30 minutes in a day for anything other than meeting deadlines if they wish to succeed in this. It kills the passion and inspiration one might start their studies with.
And that’s the real catch, isn’t it? The reason students should get excited to get involved in research is not the compensation, but excitement to learn about, contribute towards and experience science and scientific processes.
The post-truth era we are living in has shaken students’ faith in academia to the point where participating in a study seems like a waste of time, even if there was time to waste. To put it simply, students don’t have faith in the impact of research like they used to – which makes sense, since it’s difficult to have faith in the future itself. Group works and guest lecturers do not feel like possibilities of sharing ideas and creating new perspectives; rather, they are obstacles in graduating in time to perform a happy life in the ruins of enlightened modern societies. For a student, thirty minutes is nothing and simultaneously an eternity at the brink of the end of the world. This is a sinister interpretation for the direction that academia, and with it, science, is headed.
It might seem dramatic, but I genuinely believe that the lessened importance of truth in informing our understanding of reality has isolated students from the science they are supposed to be promoting.
(It is worth to note here, however, that there were a lot of lecturers and University representatives who did help and the people who did show up were always incredibly nice and patient even when the study ended up often taking longer than 30-minutes, and if any of you are reading this just know you made my day by showing up behind that door!)
The leader of the research project Dr Kajanus has often noted that irritation, in its core, can be a positive feeling as long as you don’t let it consume you – it can alert you to things that you might want to look into, investigate, but are not yet an issue. Irritation can therefore become either motion or stillness depending on how we react to it. In this case, irritation with not getting participants could be identified as a sign of my growing worry about the state of academia and societal change.
And while the irritation of waiting for a no-show participant in a cold staircase could at times feel paralyzing, through changing perspective it ended up becoming motivation to despite these challenges find ways to get the task done. Being motivated to solve an issue on a personal level does not take the worry away from the state of the world or academia, but having control of your irritations instead of them controlling you gives a sense of agency that helps to navigate those worries.
Before I get too French post-structuralist, let’s reel it back to the study at hand. While I was making sense of my irritations, the work itself became a source of inspiration. The language of research is plural: “we thank you for your time”, it said in the script despite it often only being me representing this big project to the participant.
I felt the same plurality straight from the start as I was welcomed to the team with patience, kindness and expertise. The focus, drive and work-ethic of all the talented people in the office was inspiring rather than intimidating. Inspiration, motion – definitely not stillness, despite sitting at my desk hitting my head to the table some days.
But inspiration alone does not erase the fact that personally this spring was tough; work, thesis, voluntary work, health issues of close ones, etc, etc, etc– a lot of it exciting, some of it devastating, all of it a lot. And yet I am eternally thankful that I got to reflect on the rising irritations and not become them as the stress I expected to make me more and more irritated as the deadline of the thesis approached did not realize.
Leaving this position I am endlessly thankful for the time I got to spend working with this incredible project, and I cannot wait to see what this amazing group of researchers will continue to make of irritation!