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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2369 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 28, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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If we're listing our insecurities, I've got plenty to share:

  1. Call it lassitude or simply lack of motivation, but I've never felt driven to any meaningful degree. Life has mostly been a series of taking the easy (or if not so easy, then default) course of actions for me. I didn't feel passionate about medicine, but it was both comfortably familiar and paid better than the alternatives.

That's changed to some degree, now that I've done most of what's required to escape India and practise in the UK, but it's nowhere near gone. I feel like I could hand most of my life over to an autopilot, and in fact I gladly would.

  1. I feel grossly inadequate as a doctor compared to my overachieving family. I'll never be as good a surgeon as my dad or grandpa, not that I wanted to go into that field myself. Chalk it down to ADHD or depression, but I can't lie to myself and claim I'm as good a doctor as they are, I certainly don't read journals and publications unless needed for an exam.

  2. I'm going through a quarter life crisis, prompted by a sense of deep FOMO. I see some of my friends having fun in Uni, whereas all I did and will do for the next decade or so is study when I'm not exhausted by work. And I've found someone I really like, but I still feel like I'm missing out on the wilder side of my 20s, instead of fucking around and playing the field, I'm looking at settling down sooner rather than later. I think the grass might not actually be greener, but god knows I still dream of sowing my wild oats.

  3. It's unlikely I'll be making more than solidly middle class levels of money anytime soon, I simply lack the drive for entrepreneurship, or an interest in the kinds of medical work that pays big bucks, even if UK salaries weren't ass.

  4. I'll miss my family and my dogs when I'm abroad, I barely spent 2 months outside and I was getting super homesick by the end.

Eh, I'm mostly doing ok with the hand I've been dealt. Being born in the 3rd World is no fun at all, and while the end is in sight, I feel like my life is nowhere near exciting as I once dreamt of.

Being a doctor sounds brutal. Have you thought about switching to PT or nursing or something less demanding?

It gets better eventually, when I become a psychiatrist my workload should be significantly lighter, albeit I still hate the very idea of 9 to 5s haha.

Becoming a PT or nurse would require retraining, a loss of both earning potential and actual salary. Plus the latter can be quite hectic too!

Oh cool, I’d imagine psych type stuff is less crazy than hospital work, if still pretty grueling. Good on ya!

I'll miss my family and my dogs when I'm abroad, I barely spent 2 months outside and I was getting super homesick by the end.

I currently live up the street from the house I grew up in, so I can't talk on this one.

If you found someone you really like, you're ahead of the game. Your anniversaries will be trumping your friends' anniversaries forever! Really, I've been with my wife for a decade, and I'm so glad that we met before we started forming baggage when I compare my life with my friends who ran around and have a couple crazy-ex-skeletons in their closets. It's a blessing, even if it can feel like a rip-off, a paraphrase of Augustine "Lord let me find someone, but not yet!"

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