Opus Nuclei's Garden
Powered by 🌱Roam GardenNovember 4th, 2020
I'm busy. Short Essay
I've been toying with the idea of becoming a part-time neurosurgeon in the future. Silly, is it not? The grueling, time-demanding, high-pressure, competitive specialty will elude if I didn't commit 25 hours, 8 days a week from now. A few days ago, I reflected on the nature of wealth and work:
The generous will themselves be blessed, for they share their food with the poor. (Proverbs 22:9)
Wealth or money is intended to heal and repair lives. The more we give it away to break bread with fellow humans, especially the unfortunate ones, we become more like God; we are blessed. Why? I think it's because we get to experience what God feels when He gave His all, namely, His Own Son, for the good of his creation.
What does it mean to be blessed (and free)-- including as a doctor? Some God-worshipping communities certainly got their teaching heading in the wrong direction.
Isn't busy a good thing?
I do not want to be controlled by a system - whatever it is, despite how in love I am with the field. I liked public health before (I still do), but the system constraints how I want to conduct my life.
The degree of security needed to able to say 'fuck you' to my boss is a quite reliable thermostat.
I once comment on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's tweet about the scalability of 12 professions based on his best-seller book, The Black Swan --luckily he replied:
Medicine is a competitive field that promises financial security and stability; the last frontier to crumble in modern civilization (look no further but the current pandemic for the proof). However, socialism seems to gain popularity and this, in my opinion, destroys that security. When you are robbed of your years of training in the name of equality (or whatever politicians said about equity), it banishes your compound interest.
Notice that he mentioned authors as one of the scalable professions. Do you know why? Because you can trade your time to build one book, but you can sell it millions of times. Being a doctor -- you always trade your time with one patient, you can never sell the same prescriptions (or surgery) to other patients without trading another time.
Too much diversity among doctors -> some doctors' time worth more or less than other doctors.