I don’t know where I got the idea that the point of younger life was to set yourself up so that older life ran on autopilot, but I was pretty sure this was how things worked. It’s not that I didn’t think life would be challenging after the age of 40. It’s just that I thought the important decisions would already be made and thus I would be able to just kind of go through the motions without stressing too much. When I was in my 20s, it certainly looked like that’s what middle-aged people I knew were doing.
At some level, my understanding was that if I got the education, spouse, children, house, pet(s), etc then I would kind of be set until it was time to downsize and move into a retirement community. Then I could REALLY just go with the flow. Dinner at the cafeteria, scheduled social time, a coach/helper for bathing… Talk about coasting!
Anyway, this anticipated period of going with the flow has not happened at all. It turns out that, regardless of what we do or accomplish, life is always going to require our full attention. Whether it’s navigating the US healthcare system, dealing with a complete change in your workplace management structure, or battling a local homeowners’ association, our full and active engagement in this life appears to be both mandatory and continuous.
I’ll be honest here. When I graduated from veterinary school, I knew I would need to keep up with advances in medicine to stay competent at my job as a veterinarian. That didn’t seem like such a big investment on my part in exchange for having a livelihood that I enjoyed and found meaningful. Again, I thought I’d kind of done the hard part and, after getting some experience, I would be able to kind of just… keep on keeping on.
Today, I am not just keeping up with new advances in medicine (and boy howdy there are a lot of them!). I’m also trying to:
- Leverage new AI technology to help make up for being shorthanded
- Advise veterinarians on how to advocate for themselves to the venture capitalists who want a 10x return on their investment
- Talk to clients who have shot right past learning from Dr. Google and gone on to passionately educate themselves with 40-second TikTok animal influencer videos
- Raise wages for support staff while keeping pet care affordable
Remember when the answer to the question of “What do I do if I’m shorthanded” was simply “hire someone?” What a simpler time. I just assumed things would kind of stay like that.
I’m not saying all of this to complain. I’m honestly not. I love vet medicine and the life it’s given me. I genuinely find the challenges I listed above to be interesting and worthy of our attention. I just didn’t think the profession (and life outside it) would require my full attentiveness every day after 15 years of practice. I suspect I was not alone in this delusion.
I’m pointing all of this out now for two reasons. The first is that I know I’m not the only person who has been secretly wondering when the cruise control part of life would be starting. If you have had these thoughts and decided that you must be doing something wrong since you still can’t take your hands off the wheel, I want to tell you that you are not. Practice (and life) are never going to be “hands off,” even if other people make it look that way. You are probably doing just fine and should be proud of yourself for how you are handling everything. You are not failing because things have not gotten easy. You are making your way through an interesting life, and interesting lives are apparently averse to letting us relax for very long.
The second reason I’m bringing up the idea that life was supposed to get easier is because the expectations we set for ourselves matter. Nothing makes a hectic day in the clinic more draining than going in and hoping for an empty schedule. The same is true in all aspects of our lives. If we anticipate being challenged and engaged, the days fly by and we feel proud of what we have accomplished. When we instead think we are supposed to be relaxing, hectic days feel like a slap in the face.
The lesson for me has been to give up the false idea that life is a big climb and then a steady downhill toward the retirement home. Most of us mid-to-late career people are working as hard and making as many challenging choices as we ever have, and that’s not going to change. It turns out we chose the path of an interesting life, and that means a life requiring our active engagement day after day.
We might as well get excited about doing a job (and having a life) that keeps us on our toes because that, it seems, is what we are in for.
