The pursuit of financial independence linked to the desire to spend some of my adult years pursuing activities other than medicine can seem like a deeply lazy indulgence to many colleagues.
Choosing to leave medicine in these prime adult years by these folks is seen as twofold betrayal. First, there is the obvious implicit lost income during one's peak earning years. In response to the idea of widening the gap between income and savings, and living more modestly by choice, one friend stated she simply would not want to live such a Spartan life. I get the allure, and if I can respect her choice, I hope she can respect mine.
The second is the perception that these are the years in which my contribution to society should be maximal, and that decades of training and experience as a physician would be selfishly squandered were I to jump off the plane with my golden parachute.
[Part me of wants to reply, But the plane is aflame, losing altitude and heading toward that mountainside! But that's not the direction I want to take with this scrap of words.]Is it a lazy indulgence? It depends on your frame of reference.
I grant that it's an indulgence, but I consider myself an ambitious form of sloth. I have big plans for my leisure:
- Cultivating mastery of a new set of skills.
- Reading extensively to cultivate the empathy that is the root of all great fiction.
- Contributing to those on society's margins.
- Spending time with my kids while they are still living under our roof.
- Growing together with my wife. Travel while we have health and wanderlust in abundance.
- Enjoying my parents while they remain lucid, and being present as they grow fragile.
- Deepening friendships and planting roots in my community.
- Preserving fitness and health.
- Continuing to write in some form.
This is a partial list by design. There are many more bullet points on my bucket list, some highly specific and some more vague. It's the ambiguous ones that excite me.
As peers congeal into a fixed identity (often heavily informed by the medical profession), I remain a work in progress. Therein lies the beauty of reaching FI and reallocating my time to other pursuits.
Life is so very short for the density of experience I hope to cram in - what a luxury to consider that I might get to live out more than a single version of myself.
Comments 2
No need to harbor guilt at flying the coop. We ceased being physicians a decade ago when we became providers. I came to medicine out of left field. The interviewer asked my why I wanted to be a “doctor”. I never really thought about it. I didn’t have some canned comment so I told him what I thought; I think I’m committed enough to do the job and smart enough to do the job for the particular patient population I would serve. I love being a physician but in the end it’s a job.
In reality, as unpoetic as it sounds, you only get to live a single finite version of yourself and then you die. Once you understand that, life takes on a new clarity.
Author
Amen. I’m grateful for my career, but I never mistook it for a calling.