Halloween is getting more productive, efficient… and sad (and I don’t want that to happen to veterinary medicine).
We don’t get a ton of trick-or-treaters at my house, but this year we had a noticeable downturn. My daughter went out with her friends and reported back that the streets were basically empty except for kids being shuttled around in cars or surprisingly souped-up golf carts from one driveway to the next.
I heard the same thing from numerous friends: neighborhoods that used to bustle with hordes of minions, pirates, and hockey-masked killers were practically ghost towns on Halloween. And it wasn’t the weather. Here in the Southeast, it was absolute perfection for walking around. It was crisp, dry, and not a drop of rain. The fall colors were even showing out in the twilight. There was no cosmic force driving people inside. I think people stayed home (or hopped into golf carts) because they found a more efficient, high-yield way to “win” the holiday.
When I was a kid, we obviously wanted candy. (Ideally the full-sized bars, though we usually got Tootsie Rolls and Smarties.) But candy wasn’t really what the night was about. In retrospect, our Halloweens were less about collecting payload and far more about roaming the dark neighborhood with a pack of kids, navigating minor interpersonal conflicts, and figuring out how to spend a night with minimal supervision. It was about being free and feeling like you were behaving in a way that wasn’t allowed when it actually was. Halloween was about skirting the very edge of trouble without actually getting grounded. The long walks between houses weren’t a bug in the system; they were the whole point. That shared, slightly chaotic experience was what made the night special.
Today, traditional trick-or-treating is rapidly being replaced by streamlined, high-throughput alternatives. Now, I don’t mean to make anyone feel judged here! I want every family to celebrate in whatever way works for them. But to me, a trunk-or-treat event where kids shuffle between parked cars in a church parking lot to harvest sugar feels like a fundamentally different event than the Halloween I grew up with. People say the world is less safe than it was when I was young, but the research shows that’s honestly not true. Kids are safer today than we ever were.
Seeing kids get ferried from house to house in custom golf carts certainly optimizes their per-minute candy collection rate. It drastically expands their territory and eliminates any painful uphill walks. But it also replaces the wandering, independent hordes of kids with chauffeur-driven door-to-door candy drops. In removing the friction, we lose the exact chaos that brought the night its richness.
This push to extract maximum payout with minimum friction isn’t just happening on October 31st. It mirrors what’s happening across modern culture. This hyper-focus on gathering as much candy as possible, as fast as possible, reflects our obsession with speed and output. But when efficiency becomes the primary metric, it often hollows out the actual meaning of what we’re doing.
Which brings me to veterinary medicine. The parts of this job that mean the most to me (and that keep our profession grounded) are rooted in human connection. They’re about sitting in an exam room, listening with your whole body, building trust, and gently placing hands on a pet while being fully present with that family. Veterinary care isn’t supposed to be a hammer-down assembly line where we sprint from room to room, churn out diagnostics, and dish out treatment plans at maximum velocity.
There has to be more to it than profit and output metrics. I know how hard it is to explain to a ten-year-old that filling three pillowcases with fun-size Snickers isn’t actually the ultimate goal of Halloween. But honestly, it feels just as hard sometimes to convince our teams, our fellow stressed-out vets, our employers, and even ourselves that more isn’t always better. We cannot optimize our way to better medicine if we strip away the time required to care.
At the end of the day, our work is about showing up for people and their animals. As we push relentlessly toward peak efficiency, we risk severing the very connections that draw us to this work in the first place, much like kids streamlining Halloween until they’re just picking out 5lb bags of candy directly from the store and eating them on the way home.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but I like a little bit of inefficiency. It’s not that I want things to be slow (although some things should be). I just like the unscripted moments, the awkward conversations, and the slow process of building trust with clients and coming to understand people. I like taking the time to walk through the journey of healing together. I believe that’s a big part of why we are here, doing this job.
I don’t know where Halloween goes from here, but I hope veterinary medicine can intentionally resist the urge to go continuously faster and cut to the payday. I hope we will always honor the process, and stay deeply engaged in the human side of what we do, even if it means taking a few extra steps along the way.
