I personally know a few dear friends who, for various reasons, have all dropped out of the "normal" "professional work" life that we spent nearly 20 years getting into. I think perhaps a common...
I personally know a few dear friends who, for various reasons, have all dropped out of the "normal" "professional work" life that we spent nearly 20 years getting into. I think perhaps a common thread is that the work became a source of suffering.
Perhaps seeing your work contribute to late stage capitalistic greed and enshittification was a moral injury. Perhaps working the oil/gas/petroleum/plastics industry. Perhaps being viewed as a cog to be taken max advantages of, to have your "Protestant work ethic" be taken advantaged of to the degree your only choices are to "compromise your true self and leave the job half done", or else watch your body break down to getting the job nearly done, knowing they'll push harder until it does break. Perhaps it's having to attend yet another corporate "we care" manifesto presentation yet again while full well knowing they don't care about these values like human rights or equality or work life balance or whatever.
Yeah, maybe "we can't hack it". But maybe we don't want to. As Dr Goobie says, it's going to kill us. Maybe quitting these professional jobs and walking away either into the sunset or into a much lower paying job is our way of saving our lives, and to have some of this life to share with our loved ones.
I for one think it's worth it. I'm glad Dr Goobie has the support of his wife. :)
I walked away from a large salary engineering job that I spent almost 10 years working my way into without schooling. This was during the Covid 19 pandemic and I was burning out in about every...
I walked away from a large salary engineering job that I spent almost 10 years working my way into without schooling. This was during the Covid 19 pandemic and I was burning out in about every aspect of my life. I couldn't even stay a few extra months for a promised five figure bonus if I could wait until the end of 2021 to leave. My whole body, brain, spirit was just exhausted. As the Dr said, "it was going to kill me" if I stayed.
My amazing supportive partner was watching all this happen to me at work and home (we worked at the same company) and felt helpless in what to do other the encourage me "to do what I need to do" when I discussed quitting my job. We moved back out west where we were before we moved for this job and have been slowly rebuilding ourselves financially and mentally.
At times I truly miss the work I did and do still stay in contact with a few people that are still there, but I don't doubt for a second that I would have ended my life if I would have stayed on the path I was. Living authentically and going to therapy have absolutely slowly brought me out of the dark dark void that I was in, but I am still recovering even years later.
Don't kill yourselves for people or places that don't care about you and would throw you away in an instance if it benefited them in an way. This is a lesson I try to impart on all the young people I work with now.
If I may ask, did you consider taking an extended med leave or a sabbatical or otherwise attempted to "one foot in"? I can imagine needing a life saving clean break and being very clear that you...
If I may ask, did you consider taking an extended med leave or a sabbatical or otherwise attempted to "one foot in"? I can imagine needing a life saving clean break and being very clear that you wouldn't want to use the "nah I changed my mind". But is the 100% quitting without a backup an important part of the healing process?
In the state I was in, the idea of coming back after some time off was horrible and just not something that I could do. The clean break with no backup was just what I needed to do, I can't say it...
In the state I was in, the idea of coming back after some time off was horrible and just not something that I could do.
The clean break with no backup was just what I needed to do, I can't say it would be the right choice for anyone else. I knew my skills and have been a survivor for the majority of my life, I just knew we would figure it out. Worse case for me, I would go back to working service jobs like I did in high school.
What has really helped me out was just working way less that I was. I went from 60+ hour weeks to 40, then 30, and at times 20 hours now. I set up hard boundaries with my current job that technical work is great for me. Soldering, assembly, repair of electro mechanical things are my bread and butter, but managerial, document heavy, bureaucratic things just are a no go.
That sounds excellent and I'm happy for you and your family I think we'll all be better off if everyone can afford to stop working. Or work part time. Or 40 hrs hard max. We'd see reduction in...
That sounds excellent and I'm happy for you and your family
I think we'll all be better off if everyone can afford to stop working. Or work part time. Or 40 hrs hard max. We'd see reduction in obesity and depression and heart disease at a minimum
I agree completely. Hopefully my comments do not come off as laissez-faire when it comes to just quitting and working less as I know a large majority of people in the US and around the world just...
I agree completely.
Hopefully my comments do not come off as laissez-faire when it comes to just quitting and working less as I know a large majority of people in the US and around the world just do not have the option to do so. I had the safety net of my partner income then when I quit and now when I work less. I don't have physical health issues that required keeping health insurance, etc.
I think the goal for everyone should absolutely be work less, spend more time with your friends and family, but this can sound very hollow when you can't or don't feel like you can do those things for whatever reason. Humans were not meant for the life we live currently, the way things are right now and the growing sense of pointlessness in people should really be making people worried about humanities future.
Am I the only one who found this video intensely bizarre? Dr. Goobie seems to be externalizing all of his problems when, to me, a lot of his problems are deeply internal. He blames a...
Am I the only one who found this video intensely bizarre?
Dr. Goobie seems to be externalizing all of his problems when, to me, a lot of his problems are deeply internal. He blames a commercialized medical system, which I frankly don't believe exists to the extent he insinuates it does, which he became disillusioned with after "discovering" what science and medicine has been telling us for decades now re: sleeping well, eating well, movement, social involvement, regulation of emotions, and all of the impact on the body and health those things can have. The whole time he's ignoring that only one-third of hospitals in the US are for profit, that integrative medicine is a thing and can both pay his bills while giving the exact type of medical treatment that he clearly cares deeply about, that even if everyone lived healthy lifestyles spine and brain surgery would still very much be a thing, and that neurosurgery can be practiced in a clinic setting which would be night and day different than in a hospital setting. And then he talks about how much better he feels after leaving neurosurgery because he now sleeps well, eats well, moves, has more social involvement, and can better regulate his emotions....the exact things that he knows are what can heal a body.
Instead of someone who finds balance, he strikes me as someone who can't seem to see the bigger picture. He goes to work with a world expert on machine-brain interfaces and gives up when he realizes that because of immune defenses the interfaces can never be permanent, which I don't believe is necessarily universally true and completely ignores that this is an emerging field in its infancy that needs people like him to do the research and overcome these problems. He becomes disillusioned with his job and instead of seeking alternatives or trying to effect any sort of change, he accepts this is the way it is and sees the issue as black and white: either leave or suffer. Instead of finding balance in his life he takes the extreme to leave it all and wander nature, as if millions of professionals working in intense industries don't find ways to both get the job done and be healthy.
I know this comment is getting very ranty but Dr. Goobie is unfortunately a type of person that I'm all too familiar with. Highly educated, academically successful individuals who struggle with not finding success (however they define it), and have difficulty operating outside of very narrow confines. My ex from a long term relationship is a doctor who works in a hospital and while he is very successful professionally, he struggles to function in the real world and sees things very black and white. When met with any challenge that fell outside of his narrow capabilities as a doctor he was prone to giving up, for whatever reason these type of people are deeply negatively affected by any perception of failure or the possibility thereof.
I was having lunch with an accomplished neurosurgeon friend of mine and he was complaining about doctors who worked in hospitals (he worked in a private clinic). When I asked him why, he explained that in his experience the doctors in hospitals were the academic go getters who strive for status and achievement and that while they are very competent in the hospital setting they are almost like children outside of it - at times very immature and unable to cope - because their worldviews and experience are so narrow. I was flabbergasted as I told him he was describing my ex partner to a T. And in much the same way, Dr. Goobie strikes me as exactly this type of person.
I'm very glad that he found happiness and healing but I'm struggling to understand what I'm supposed to take away from this video. I don't see someone who realized they are a cog in the wheel of late-stage capitalism and heroically decided to give up the rat race to find peace in nature, I see someone who is probably deeply troubled internally and was able to find convenient external excuses for his shortcomings that don't really stand up to further scrutiny
I had the same big picture question. I wondered if he considered pivoting to primary care or starting his own practice, since he seemed to have an aha moment about preventative care. "Convenient...
I had the same big picture question. I wondered if he considered pivoting to primary care or starting his own practice, since he seemed to have an aha moment about preventative care.
"Convenient external excuses for his shortcomings" seems kind of harsh though? He likely devoted 12-15 years of his life becoming a neurosurgeon and embraced the mission to ease human suffering. US doctors themselves aren't treated well by the system, especially during residency. As you pointed out, they often sacrifice their own health in order to help others. I also suspect that Dr. Goobie saw way more BS behind the scenes than he let on in the video. He hinted at hospital administration getting in the way of curing people, since that would be like working themselves out of a job. I'm guessing that all of these realizations culminated in his massive disillusionment of the system, whether he went for-profit or nonprofit.
Not the person you replied to, but although I agree the phrasing is harsh, I've had very similar experiences with doctor friends and co-workers. Enough so that I've come to accept that a person's...
Not the person you replied to, but although I agree the phrasing is harsh, I've had very similar experiences with doctor friends and co-workers. Enough so that I've come to accept that a person's greatest weakness and greatest strength is usually the same aspect of their personality, and the higher the achievement in the very competitive medical world, the sharper the person's genius/pathology. It is very painful to see up close. These people are my friends, and they suffer!
But I'm not sure what can be done to help. It's like asking me to get over my ADHD. I can't, it's an inherent part of my being to the very core. The best I can do is work around its limitations. All I can do for my friends is be their friends, even when they can't make cause/effect connections that are painfully clear to me. They are there for me when I fail yet again with what for them are basic life skills, like time management and task planning. They still love me, I can, at the very least, return the favor, and hopefully we are all the better off for it.
Non-profit is not enough to shield hospitals from criticism. I forget which podcast I listened to on this, but at some point hospitals in the US transitioned to non-profit after a change in laws,...
Non-profit is not enough to shield hospitals from criticism. I forget which podcast I listened to on this, but at some point hospitals in the US transitioned to non-profit after a change in laws, and around that time, prices also shot up in addition to administrators' pay. Non-profit just means they can't pay out dividends to shareholders, but they can pay exorbitant salaries and shovel money into wasteful buildings chasing prestige.
Whether or not they do, I don't have any hard data here, but certainly none of the hospitals in my area make me feel good the way I think a non-profit should. IKEA is a non-profit, by the way.
EDIT: I think it was Freakonomics E456. It's been a few years, so apologies if I misrepresented it. Here's the passage that I was probably thinking of:
Now, just to be clear: about 60 percent of community hospitals in the U.S. qualify as “non-profit,” but that word probably does not mean what you think it means. Until 1969, a non-profit hospital was required to provide care even to patients who couldn’t afford it.
That so-called “charitable care standard” was replaced with what’s called a “community benefit standard” — which is, shall we say, a bit looser. And which allows non-profit hospitals to operate pretty much like a for-profit business while enjoying tax-exempt status. In fact, non-profit hospitals often make more money than for-profits. Where does that money go? Executive salaries, for one. A Forbes analysis of the 82 largest non-profit hospitals in the U.S. found that the vast majority of them paid their top-earning executive between $1 and $5 million a year, with 13 of the 82 non-profit hospitals paying their top executive between $5 million and $21.6 million a year.
Also ... interesting to note. This guy has recorded and posted close to 100 videos of his dog and walking around in nature, just in the past 2 months. Most of his videos only have a few hundred...
Also ... interesting to note. This guy has recorded and posted close to 100 videos of his dog and walking around in nature, just in the past 2 months. Most of his videos only have a few hundred views; a couple of them are more popular, have 5-6 thousand views.
In 2 days, this video of his is already up to 360 thousand views.
The video made me think about a... writing/life lesson I have learned, which is "be authentic". The way the doctor in the video spoke from his heart was compelling, and it raised many thoughts...
The video made me think about a... writing/life lesson I have learned, which is "be authentic". The way the doctor in the video spoke from his heart was compelling, and it raised many thoughts from me. He detailed a healthcare system problem, but I feel like it is a bigger/more universal problem of human themselves, where everything is distorted in the name of commercialization.
Just a quick tangent ... right here at 43:28 into the video ... from the right edge of the screen, behind his head, a quite large predator-like animal strolls down the hillside. Maybe a fisher,...
Just a quick tangent ... right here at 43:28 into the video ... from the right edge of the screen, behind his head, a quite large predator-like animal strolls down the hillside. Maybe a fisher, maybe even a wolverine (definitely looks weasel-like). At first, I thought it was his dog -- he is right in the middle of talking about doing more stuff with his dog, when it shows up.
I watched the rest of the video ... it's possible the animal can be seen later, elsewhere, but I never saw it after that. Presumably, it realized a human was recording something for youtube, and it ducked out of the line of sight.
Ah marmot is a good guess! I tried to read the transcript to see if he shared a location, and idk if it was the formatting but it made him seem like he was not doing well. I don't have the...
Ah marmot is a good guess! I tried to read the transcript to see if he shared a location, and idk if it was the formatting but it made him seem like he was not doing well. I don't have the inclination to watch the video in full so I'll stick with mammal identification
I watched a video the other day and then used google maps to find where the guy filmed from. I found it, but it was confusing because the distance behind him was much farther than the camera...
I watched a video the other day and then used google maps to find where the guy filmed from. I found it, but it was confusing because the distance behind him was much farther than the camera showed making an entire city block away seem to shrink to just across the street.
It looks like the same issue is happening here because that is most definitely a small animal. You can tell from how it moves, wolverines and similarly sized animals don't move like that.
From how it moved, kept its head down and looks like it went down a hole, makes me think ground squirrel. Also that tail flick as it started moving just screams ground squirrel to me.
I bet it has something to do with what type of lens he's using. I don't know enough about cameras to get anything close to an identification but the perception of depth in a shot is something that...
I bet it has something to do with what type of lens he's using. I don't know enough about cameras to get anything close to an identification but the perception of depth in a shot is something that gets hugely affected by it.
I personally know a few dear friends who, for various reasons, have all dropped out of the "normal" "professional work" life that we spent nearly 20 years getting into. I think perhaps a common thread is that the work became a source of suffering.
Perhaps seeing your work contribute to late stage capitalistic greed and enshittification was a moral injury. Perhaps working the oil/gas/petroleum/plastics industry. Perhaps being viewed as a cog to be taken max advantages of, to have your "Protestant work ethic" be taken advantaged of to the degree your only choices are to "compromise your true self and leave the job half done", or else watch your body break down to getting the job nearly done, knowing they'll push harder until it does break. Perhaps it's having to attend yet another corporate "we care" manifesto presentation yet again while full well knowing they don't care about these values like human rights or equality or work life balance or whatever.
Yeah, maybe "we can't hack it". But maybe we don't want to. As Dr Goobie says, it's going to kill us. Maybe quitting these professional jobs and walking away either into the sunset or into a much lower paying job is our way of saving our lives, and to have some of this life to share with our loved ones.
I for one think it's worth it. I'm glad Dr Goobie has the support of his wife. :)
I walked away from a large salary engineering job that I spent almost 10 years working my way into without schooling. This was during the Covid 19 pandemic and I was burning out in about every aspect of my life. I couldn't even stay a few extra months for a promised five figure bonus if I could wait until the end of 2021 to leave. My whole body, brain, spirit was just exhausted. As the Dr said, "it was going to kill me" if I stayed.
My amazing supportive partner was watching all this happen to me at work and home (we worked at the same company) and felt helpless in what to do other the encourage me "to do what I need to do" when I discussed quitting my job. We moved back out west where we were before we moved for this job and have been slowly rebuilding ourselves financially and mentally.
At times I truly miss the work I did and do still stay in contact with a few people that are still there, but I don't doubt for a second that I would have ended my life if I would have stayed on the path I was. Living authentically and going to therapy have absolutely slowly brought me out of the dark dark void that I was in, but I am still recovering even years later.
Don't kill yourselves for people or places that don't care about you and would throw you away in an instance if it benefited them in an way. This is a lesson I try to impart on all the young people I work with now.
If I may ask, did you consider taking an extended med leave or a sabbatical or otherwise attempted to "one foot in"? I can imagine needing a life saving clean break and being very clear that you wouldn't want to use the "nah I changed my mind". But is the 100% quitting without a backup an important part of the healing process?
In the state I was in, the idea of coming back after some time off was horrible and just not something that I could do.
The clean break with no backup was just what I needed to do, I can't say it would be the right choice for anyone else. I knew my skills and have been a survivor for the majority of my life, I just knew we would figure it out. Worse case for me, I would go back to working service jobs like I did in high school.
What has really helped me out was just working way less that I was. I went from 60+ hour weeks to 40, then 30, and at times 20 hours now. I set up hard boundaries with my current job that technical work is great for me. Soldering, assembly, repair of electro mechanical things are my bread and butter, but managerial, document heavy, bureaucratic things just are a no go.
That sounds excellent and I'm happy for you and your family
I think we'll all be better off if everyone can afford to stop working. Or work part time. Or 40 hrs hard max. We'd see reduction in obesity and depression and heart disease at a minimum
I agree completely.
Hopefully my comments do not come off as laissez-faire when it comes to just quitting and working less as I know a large majority of people in the US and around the world just do not have the option to do so. I had the safety net of my partner income then when I quit and now when I work less. I don't have physical health issues that required keeping health insurance, etc.
I think the goal for everyone should absolutely be work less, spend more time with your friends and family, but this can sound very hollow when you can't or don't feel like you can do those things for whatever reason. Humans were not meant for the life we live currently, the way things are right now and the growing sense of pointlessness in people should really be making people worried about humanities future.
Am I the only one who found this video intensely bizarre?
Dr. Goobie seems to be externalizing all of his problems when, to me, a lot of his problems are deeply internal. He blames a commercialized medical system, which I frankly don't believe exists to the extent he insinuates it does, which he became disillusioned with after "discovering" what science and medicine has been telling us for decades now re: sleeping well, eating well, movement, social involvement, regulation of emotions, and all of the impact on the body and health those things can have. The whole time he's ignoring that only one-third of hospitals in the US are for profit, that integrative medicine is a thing and can both pay his bills while giving the exact type of medical treatment that he clearly cares deeply about, that even if everyone lived healthy lifestyles spine and brain surgery would still very much be a thing, and that neurosurgery can be practiced in a clinic setting which would be night and day different than in a hospital setting. And then he talks about how much better he feels after leaving neurosurgery because he now sleeps well, eats well, moves, has more social involvement, and can better regulate his emotions....the exact things that he knows are what can heal a body.
Instead of someone who finds balance, he strikes me as someone who can't seem to see the bigger picture. He goes to work with a world expert on machine-brain interfaces and gives up when he realizes that because of immune defenses the interfaces can never be permanent, which I don't believe is necessarily universally true and completely ignores that this is an emerging field in its infancy that needs people like him to do the research and overcome these problems. He becomes disillusioned with his job and instead of seeking alternatives or trying to effect any sort of change, he accepts this is the way it is and sees the issue as black and white: either leave or suffer. Instead of finding balance in his life he takes the extreme to leave it all and wander nature, as if millions of professionals working in intense industries don't find ways to both get the job done and be healthy.
I know this comment is getting very ranty but Dr. Goobie is unfortunately a type of person that I'm all too familiar with. Highly educated, academically successful individuals who struggle with not finding success (however they define it), and have difficulty operating outside of very narrow confines. My ex from a long term relationship is a doctor who works in a hospital and while he is very successful professionally, he struggles to function in the real world and sees things very black and white. When met with any challenge that fell outside of his narrow capabilities as a doctor he was prone to giving up, for whatever reason these type of people are deeply negatively affected by any perception of failure or the possibility thereof.
I was having lunch with an accomplished neurosurgeon friend of mine and he was complaining about doctors who worked in hospitals (he worked in a private clinic). When I asked him why, he explained that in his experience the doctors in hospitals were the academic go getters who strive for status and achievement and that while they are very competent in the hospital setting they are almost like children outside of it - at times very immature and unable to cope - because their worldviews and experience are so narrow. I was flabbergasted as I told him he was describing my ex partner to a T. And in much the same way, Dr. Goobie strikes me as exactly this type of person.
I'm very glad that he found happiness and healing but I'm struggling to understand what I'm supposed to take away from this video. I don't see someone who realized they are a cog in the wheel of late-stage capitalism and heroically decided to give up the rat race to find peace in nature, I see someone who is probably deeply troubled internally and was able to find convenient external excuses for his shortcomings that don't really stand up to further scrutiny
I had the same big picture question. I wondered if he considered pivoting to primary care or starting his own practice, since he seemed to have an aha moment about preventative care.
"Convenient external excuses for his shortcomings" seems kind of harsh though? He likely devoted 12-15 years of his life becoming a neurosurgeon and embraced the mission to ease human suffering. US doctors themselves aren't treated well by the system, especially during residency. As you pointed out, they often sacrifice their own health in order to help others. I also suspect that Dr. Goobie saw way more BS behind the scenes than he let on in the video. He hinted at hospital administration getting in the way of curing people, since that would be like working themselves out of a job. I'm guessing that all of these realizations culminated in his massive disillusionment of the system, whether he went for-profit or nonprofit.
Not the person you replied to, but although I agree the phrasing is harsh, I've had very similar experiences with doctor friends and co-workers. Enough so that I've come to accept that a person's greatest weakness and greatest strength is usually the same aspect of their personality, and the higher the achievement in the very competitive medical world, the sharper the person's genius/pathology. It is very painful to see up close. These people are my friends, and they suffer!
But I'm not sure what can be done to help. It's like asking me to get over my ADHD. I can't, it's an inherent part of my being to the very core. The best I can do is work around its limitations. All I can do for my friends is be their friends, even when they can't make cause/effect connections that are painfully clear to me. They are there for me when I fail yet again with what for them are basic life skills, like time management and task planning. They still love me, I can, at the very least, return the favor, and hopefully we are all the better off for it.
Non-profit is not enough to shield hospitals from criticism. I forget which podcast I listened to on this, but at some point hospitals in the US transitioned to non-profit after a change in laws, and around that time, prices also shot up in addition to administrators' pay. Non-profit just means they can't pay out dividends to shareholders, but they can pay exorbitant salaries and shovel money into wasteful buildings chasing prestige.
Whether or not they do, I don't have any hard data here, but certainly none of the hospitals in my area make me feel good the way I think a non-profit should. IKEA is a non-profit, by the way.
EDIT: I think it was Freakonomics E456. It's been a few years, so apologies if I misrepresented it. Here's the passage that I was probably thinking of:
Also ... interesting to note. This guy has recorded and posted close to 100 videos of his dog and walking around in nature, just in the past 2 months. Most of his videos only have a few hundred views; a couple of them are more popular, have 5-6 thousand views.
In 2 days, this video of his is already up to 360 thousand views.
The video made me think about a... writing/life lesson I have learned, which is "be authentic". The way the doctor in the video spoke from his heart was compelling, and it raised many thoughts from me. He detailed a healthcare system problem, but I feel like it is a bigger/more universal problem of human themselves, where everything is distorted in the name of commercialization.
Just a quick tangent ... right here at 43:28 into the video ... from the right edge of the screen, behind his head, a quite large predator-like animal strolls down the hillside. Maybe a fisher, maybe even a wolverine (definitely looks weasel-like). At first, I thought it was his dog -- he is right in the middle of talking about doing more stuff with his dog, when it shows up.
I watched the rest of the video ... it's possible the animal can be seen later, elsewhere, but I never saw it after that. Presumably, it realized a human was recording something for youtube, and it ducked out of the line of sight.
Anyone care to hazard a guess as to what it is?
My guess is a marmot of some kind, definitely too small to be a large predator.
Ah marmot is a good guess! I tried to read the transcript to see if he shared a location, and idk if it was the formatting but it made him seem like he was not doing well. I don't have the inclination to watch the video in full so I'll stick with mammal identification
Much smaller than a dog IMO, but I'd go weasel family as a quick guess with no idea of where he is
I watched a video the other day and then used google maps to find where the guy filmed from. I found it, but it was confusing because the distance behind him was much farther than the camera showed making an entire city block away seem to shrink to just across the street.
It looks like the same issue is happening here because that is most definitely a small animal. You can tell from how it moves, wolverines and similarly sized animals don't move like that.
From how it moved, kept its head down and looks like it went down a hole, makes me think ground squirrel. Also that tail flick as it started moving just screams ground squirrel to me.
I bet it has something to do with what type of lens he's using. I don't know enough about cameras to get anything close to an identification but the perception of depth in a shot is something that gets hugely affected by it.