Dr. David is a DJ Now
What happens when a doctor decides he wants to be a DJ in Ibiza? A thought experiment.
I am always amazed by the resilience of human beings. Put them in the most dreadful of situations, and somehow they manage to find a way to be okay with it. With time. All with time. It must be a defense mechanism of the older days, an evolutionary remnant from our tribal ancestors. Maybe that’s how our grandfathers and great grandfathers kept their sanity during world wars.
But I wonder if it actively stops us from bettering ourselves. Because this kind of adaptive reverse-hedonism can set you up to simply be okay with everything that you’re dissatisfied with. Every evil can be learnt to live with, be bearable; if it is slow enough.
Maybe ignorance is bliss. Maybe there is stability in the sedated acceptance of your reality, no matter how drab and wearisome. If all of us were always actively trying to change things around us, change who we are, then maybe the world would be chaos.
If all of us were constantly reinventing ourselves — we would lose the steady, dependable, level-headed humans that keep the machinery of the world going. Day after day. Punching in at 9, delivering those packages, making your coffee, building your house.
What if your doctor decided one day that he wanted to be a DJ in Ibiza because his own country is too restrictive to creative careers? What about his family? His kids?
There is a certain opportunity cost to maturing into an adult, to stability. When we voluntarily decide to give up the chaos of our youth and say “This is who I am. This is who I’m gonna be” — when we say yes to one possibility, when we choose, we also say no to the hundreds of other possibilities that could’ve been.
Your late 20s, this period between chaos and stability — are for weekdays when you wake up and think “What am I doing with my life? Maybe I should quit everything and move to another country”. (At times you then go ahead and have the most productive day you’ve had in months.)
But there is still be possibility of fundamentally changing what your life is. What happens when that window is closed?
So it goes.
