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:
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Fucking hell, it's clearly over for men in medicine. Somewhere in the ballpark of 80-90% of my new juniors and peers are women. I've observed the same thing in specialties that aren't psych, which was even, before becoming one of the first to end up lopsided.
And keep in mind this is a lagging marker. If I see someone who isn't a blonde girl as a med student, I need to rub my eyes. This is, to the best of my knowledge, true everywhere, and I lived through the immediate aftermath of the flip while a med student in India, a lifetime ago. Fewer blondes, of course.
I'm not complaining too hard, it suits me, to a degree. I get along with them, I'm half woman on my mother's side. And I'm sure @faceh and @Sloot will nod approvingly of what being a slightly older and reasonably successful man entails in that environment. I just happen to like women more than they do, probably, while having my fair share of criticism. It helps that I see most of them as responsible professionals, and they are as informed as can be desired about what their profession implies for their fertility goals. It's such a shame that British medical training seems tailor-made by Satan to ensure we can't reproduce.
I offered to show anyone new the secrets of our staff kitchen - telling them that drinking more than my fair share of cheap NHS instant coffee and semi-skimmed milk was just about the one perk of the job. I thought it would be just the odd person or two interested. Lo and behold, I had a train of six women behind me, in single file, heading down the ward. It felt as ridiculous as it looked, but at least they can fill whatever has replaced Stanley cups in peace.
I love women. Definitely in the abstract, and plenty of individual ones as well.
My boss is a woman, the majority of the attorneys and staff in the firm are women.
My best paralegal is a dude, it does so happen.
But I'm just too tuned in as to the sort of trends you're observing and what they mean to feel completely comfortable about where this is going.
Similar with law school.
And there's been an absolute rash of female judges behaving quite badly and unbefitting of their role in the Judicial system. Its annoyingly hard to try and maintain faith in said system in light of this. Justices Barrett and Kagan testifying in congress that they feel unsafe due to the heat brought towards them and their families for doing their job doesn't help.
Oh, and I am currently running a case where my client is a neurotic woman, the opposing party is a neurotic woman, who was previously represented by a neurotic woman, and is currently represented by a neurotic woman who has a neurotic woman legal assistant. I am dragging this case forward by my fingernails and billing appropriately, but its absolutely ridiculous that this whole thing could have been resolve six months ago if the people involved were willing to sit in a room together and hash it out. But that appears to be a literal impossibility due to the personalities involved.
I keep myself sane by working on my classic muscle car and driving it on the weekends to restore my testosterone reserves.
My sibling was fairly neurotic and I believe it’s one of the major reasons we never got along, so I know the feeling; and they inherited that from our mother. When they would go on one of their insane and anger filled tirades or crazes, the only way to get ahold of the situation was to absolutely scream at them because they would endlessly beat a dead horse, kick you while you were down and constantly rag on your ass. I always had a much more stoic and martial attitude that I inherited from my father, which naturally made our personalities almost completely incompatible with each other. The most extreme arguments we ever had always reminded me of this scene in Rush Hour; which is exactly what I wanted from them. Stand still, quit moving, sit down and shut the fuck up, or I will twist the knife as hard as I can until I make you stop it. They had no capability to control and moderate themselves and just Did. Not. Know. When. To. Stop.
In your case though, I’d imagine this is somewhat more common. Aren’t most of the people that need legal assistance precisely those kinds of people that possess problems with others and the law?
I'm fairly neurotic at a baseline. I've spent the better part of the last 5 years progressively addressing both the symptoms and the root causes. I also inherited it from my mother. My dad is stoic in the extreme. I'm currently playing a mix of hawaiian slack-key guitar music, some classic exotica, and Spanish New Age Flamenco music (Govi is AWESOME) because its soothing without making me sleepy.
I sympathize with the neurotics, but if they're not at least trying to be better and curb their worst tendencies... I want them far away from me. This includes some of my family members.
YES.
And more to the point, those are the cases that by definition tend to drag the longest. So they're the 'stickiest' clients. Which means even if it starts out where only 10% of my caseload is those types, eventually, if I don't filter, those cases become 50% or more simply because they fill all my time and crowd out new clients and I slowly close out matters for the more reasonable clients.
I've adjusted my intake process to account for this and I quote a significantly higher retainer if I suspect you'll be that type of client.
Damn. Are you sure we aren’t related and have the same parents? Whatever I have I above the neck I definitely inherited from my father, but even so, nowhere near the frequency he had it; as I couldn’t keep up with him. He had them in the extreme, extreme. My more natural joyfulness and aloofness and temperament I took more from my mother, but I did have very hard boundaries in certain places that I took from my father.
I’m also above average in neuroticism but I never had it to any crippling degree. It’s not a ‘bad’ thing intrinsically like people think, and it also poses problems that are known in the scholarly literature of the five factor model; namely that all the negative emotions load together on a single factor. I tend to remember negative experiences more strongly than positive ones, but it leads to being introspective and provokes one to learn from their encounters. Letting those emotions consume you is always a bad thing, but if I think of neuroticism I think again of a Nietzschean aphorism:
“One needs a little chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”
My mother and father were very different people with very different backgrounds. My sibling and I naturally followed their steps in being equally dissimilar, though the associated dysfunction between us was still strongly sibling in nature, despite its intensity. Not in a rivalry sense; we just objectively did not like each other. We always got along more the less we had to interact and the greater the distance was between us. They also had problems throughout though. They were very bullying (and I mean that in the direct and literal sense) and a pathological liar among other issues they dealt with. Perhaps it’s a good sign that I don’t get along with people like that. I don’t usually talk about my sibling out of respect for them. If I draw from my own experiences I don’t have a lot of positive things to say. Better to preserve their memory by not speaking on it.
Is the economics of your job more volume based or particularly case based depending on if you land some big fish/problematic client? I can’t imagine getting paid is all that fun either, if these clients are so erratically beset with issues; I’m sure it can be like pulling teeth, because they never want to pay you your fee or can’t get it together. Makes me have more sympathy and pity for public defenders. Lol. How does your retainer vary based on client? Can you do that legally? Like if you’re an asshole, there’s an X% markup on services? I’m sure it’s not like that, but you get the vibe I’m presenting.
If you have any cases that have ever stood out in your mind that you just hated dealing with, I’d love to hear an anecdote you’re willing to share.
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