Love this. My fave book about this from the last few years is Midlife: A Philosophical Guide by Kieran Setiya. Recently wrote about Setiya because he helped me consider: what do you do after you realize your profession’s dream? Setiya says that this question occurs for most of us in midlife. When you reach midlife, he observes, you look back at your travels, surveying the paths you took, the paths you did not take, and the paths you ruined. This can be distressing, as you realize that fewer choices are available to you at midlife. Some options have permanently expired, and there is no objective way to tell if you traveled the best path. And you can find yourself thinking unanswerable questions. Physicians find themselves asking questions like: -was cardiology really the right field for me? -should I have skipped med school entirely? -what would it have been like to be a poet? -to have followed Virgil instead of Hippocrates? When asking these midlife questions, you can become bored by past accomplishments but feel unable to set out toward radically new ones. Setiya’s advice is to seek the value you receive from being immersed in the activity of daily life. He calls it the atelic life instead of the telic life. The paradox of a medical career is that medical training is about pursuing accomplishments, the hero work, the telic life but the actual practice of medicine is about caring for the sick, the atelic life. When you care for patients day in and day out, the value comes from being immersed, day after day, in the care of the people you meet as patients. It’s not heroic, like in medical dramas, but endurance in the daily acts, much like the parenting and partnering.
"Mid-life is a period marked by multifaceted challenges, including physical, emotional, & social stressors. By adopting a holistic approach that addresses the whole pt, we can provide more comprehensive & effective care."— Alicia Arbaje, MD, MPH, PhD, FACP The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Margaret Chisolm Jeffrey Millstein, MD, FACP Richard Schaefer Dr. Michael Fingerhood American Geriatrics Society Colleen Christmas Art Walaszek https://lnkd.in/gfyRB_Vb
