1)Today is grant result day in Canada & my feed is full of tweets from brilliant, successful, accomplished colleagues who were not funded. We need to talk about how when PIs operate in a funding environment where so few get funded this has a huge -ve impact on their mental health

2)PIs pour their heart & soul into grants, the sense of responsibility is tremendous, our labs depend on us to do our best & when we don't get funded it can feel like we failed them. We invest so much of our creativity & hope & excitement into these grants, failure is crushing.

3)Even if a grant is good, since funding rates are so low everywhere, the reasons for failure are often arbitrary, who was assigned the grant, who else was applying that round, who happens to be in the room when grant is discussed. So much is out of our control & we feel helpless

4)Many times failure doesn't feel constructive, so many factors can affect the outcome. For the same grant you may go up in rankings then down like a yo yo. So it is hard to feel like this is a journey that leads towards a +ve outcome, it just feels like you enter a lottery again

5)Then you have to factor in the immense cost in time & mental effort that goes into the grant, which sometime comes at the expense of your loved ones & other aspects of the job. It seems like we are constantly writing grants (& many of us are in fact constantly writing grants).

6)Although doing science can be challenging, in my experience there is no aspect of the job that grinds people down & makes them lose their enthusiasm for science more than grant writing under persistent low funding conditions. It robs us of the joy & excitement of doing science.

7)We need to have a meaningful discussion in science how to reform funding to make this process more fair & less awful for everyone involved. Of course injection of additional funds can help but we must not wait for this (unlikely) outcome. After all our job is to be innovative.