Complacency

I’m Elliot. I’m 27 years old. I have a PhD in DNA Biophysics. I research how enzymes break down antibiotics. I train and compete in Olympic Weightlifting. I own a 3D printer. And I’m not sure if there’s much more to me.

Life’s goal

Half my life ago, I set the goal of getting my PhD and doing real science. Around that time, the Large Hadron Collider was coming online and every news site was posting about the end of the world. Turns out, particle physics lectures at York weren’t nearly as inspiring as all the TV documentaries and books were. Instead, I fell into biophysics via a random meeting with a new PhD student. Eventually I met their supervisor, and we designed a summer project together. Off the back of that we planned out what my PhD project would be, and here we are nearly 8 years later.

When I finished my PhD, a 12 year goal had been checked off. It was a huge goal, a genuine accomplishment, something I am proud of. The issue is, sometimes you build too much to one thing. There is not a version of myself where I wouldn’t have ended up doing a PhD, I imagined this for so long I truly don’t think I could have done any other route. Now, it feels like I spent too long working on that, and not long enough figuring out who I am outside of that.

I ended up interviewing for an interesting postdoc position. I accepted the job 2 hours later. The next few weeks were a blur. I submitted my thesis, spent 2 weeks living in hotels trying to find a flat, and moved at the start of August. Bristol was not on my radar at all at the time, and I find myself still here 2 and a half years later. September 1^st I passed my PhD viva, and that weekend I fully moved out of the city I called home for 7 years. I love York, I visit often, but I was ready to leave a lot of baggage behind. A new job, moving to Bristol, ‘moving on’, it felt exciting.

But then, Bristol never quite felt like a home for me. Initially I think I was resistant because of how huge a change it was, a completely different city to York. The uncertainty of my postdoc was not helpful here. Meant to end in April 2024, a patchwork of 3-6 month extensions just about kept me around. Throughout this, I just had a feeling of waiting it out until I could leave.

On Pause

When I was writing up my PhD thesis, I picked up Olympic Weightlifting. Not seriously at the time, I just needed a distraction whilst I finished up. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. It became more serious when I moved to Bristol. I got a coach, made all my main friends in Bristol through weightlifting, it more or less became my other life. My work was my productive lane in life, weightlifting filled out the rest. Something structured, measurable progression whilst everything else felt temporary. The numbers I can lift are something I could take away from Bristol, who could say if there’d be anything else? My whole ‘who am I’ became: computational biochemist and weightlifter. Now, in 2026, I can count on one hand the number of people I talk to that aren’t from either work or gym.

It turns out, it’s incredibly easy to be productive in the world you know and complacent in every other aspect. I did throw myself into my research, especially once I started in my current lab. It was exciting, I wasn’t doing a postdoc starting a whole new thing again, I met many new colleagues who I appreciate greatly and consider good friends. The research is more fun with more people around, and collaborations were easy. In the gym, I would train 5 days a week, had a fun group, I even attempted to qualify for English Senior Champs in 2024, and I found new motivation in 2025 to keep pushing myself even if it wasn’t to try and get a qualification total. The goal was an 80 kg snatch, I hit 81 kg in July. It’s another metric I could track. Yet the excitement of that type of achievement wears quickly, and without the bigger overarching goal, I didn’t feel the same attachment snatching 83 or 84 kg. Ultimately, even my motivation for this sport has been waning day on day.

To move to Bristol, I broke up with a (very short term) partner; she was staying in the north for her PhD, but it didn’t sting too much as we had already acknowledged it was going to happen. But this became a theme for my time in Bristol - “what’s the point? I’m leaving within a year” creates a tidy, convenient shield to not bother with becoming too close with anyone. And it worked. I haven’t been disappointed, my life and routine are comfortable, but I don’t know if I gained anything from it either.

The point is, I threw myself fully into the only 2 things I knew - work and the gym. I didn’t really make time or put in effort for other things. And this was burning up by December 2025.

2026

Even with my funding up in September, there’s a looming possibility that I will not be leaving Bristol. I am passionate about my work, and there is nowhere better in the world to do this research right now. There’s numerous funding streams I or my bosses are applying to right now, if any one of those pans out, then by the time that funding ends, I will be 31 (and potentially still end up staying in Bristol).

But where does that leave me? I said I’d been on pause since 2023, but realistically, it’s been much longer. The Covid pandemic and subsequent lockdowns put everyone on pause, by the end of it I was close to starting the third year of my PhD. I didn’t want to stay in York after, so even then I had my ‘shield’ of being over halfway through my PhD and assuming I would be leaving. Effectively, it’s been since early 2020.

This year, I set an actual New Years Resolution for the first time in a long time - unpause my life. I like to think it’s off to a good start, but it has made me realise just how complacent I have been. Last year, when I thought ‘I’m leaving in 3 months’ I sat in my living room alone for New Years and ordered a big waffle. This year, I went to a bar, drank, and danced with complete strangers until 2 am. If you told me even just 3 months ago that’s how I’d spend my New Year, I wouldn’t have believed you. To be honest, I’m not sure where this feeling has come from, perhaps just the changing of the year was enough to flip a switch for me.

It feels weird to be writing a reflection of the year so far barely 2 weeks in, but I really have done a lot more with myself than in the past, and this almost feels like a way to keep me accountable and to do more. I’m 2 weeks into a 6 week improv course. I’m awful, it’s great. It’s okay to be bad at something. I don’t need to stay in my 2 lanes that I felt confident and safe in. I have nothing to hide behind when I’m there. I want my personal life to be more than just scientist Elliot out of the lab. It’s okay to not have everything preplanned, to just let conversation flow without thinking too much.

Improv is teaching me how to not have a script, but I’m realising how long it may take me before I can do that in my life. I had a conversation with a genuinely interesting person which felt natural rather than stilted or forced. And yet, I defaulted to my safe topics, stories, science, lifting, not because it was an awkward conversation, simply because I wasn’t sure how to present myself without those labels. I felt I was just the first paragraph of this post. What I do is easy; who I am is hard. Perhaps the real aim this year is to figure that out.

Unpausing

I’ve been complacent, not so much in an overly proud, smug satisfaction kind of way, but in a risk-averse, unwilling to be vulnerable way. Life doesn’t begin and end on grant timelines. Perhaps it was logical to wait until I was in a position where I had longer, but really it just felt safer. I’m now choosing to not wait. Not to say I’ve fixed anything, but maybe admitting that is a first step towards allowing uncertainty back in.

Elliot Weising Chan, In Prep.