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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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How many of y’all find purpose in your career? I try to but ultimately I don’t think my work is that important. I’m not sure what else I could reasonably do that is important, is the problem.
I have people I care about and get meaning from other sources, but work is a perennial stress in my life since I spend so much time on it. Periods in my life where I haven’t had to work have been excellent and I have zero issues finding happiness and meaning, but obviously we have to make a living.
How does everyone else cope with a lack of meaningful employment?
I do get small glimmers of satisfaction when I can help patients, but truth be told at my current level, I don't really make much in the way of clinical decisions without a senior consultant calling the shots.
I joined medicine because it was the Default™ path, not because I had any burning passion for it, so I suppose I'll just keep grinding wages until AI leaves me unemployed. The odds really aren't good that I'll make it to consultant level as a psychiatrist and have a field of medicine to practise in.
Is doctor the default path for a lot of folks in India, or was it more of a family thing?
I'm sure a lot of people wish it was the default path, but every year there's like 2 million people competing for about 20k slots for med school!
In my case it, it very much was the latter, my whole family was made up of doctors, running back to before it was a recognized medical qualification. Nothing else spoke to me, and it offers significantly easier opportunities to get out of the country, so I ended up falling into it.
If I didn't have that kind of backing, I wager I'd probably have opted for becoming a programmer instead, I do like the subject, but didn't end up taking programming classes past a certain point because I had to choose between that and biology in the last two years of high school.
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