![]() ![]() If we allow it to become what we are to the exclusion of all else, then we’ve allowed something truly bad to happen to us. In retirement it is or will become what we did. Before the plug comes out, the CPU fries and the screen goes black. You can start reinvesting now in the value of your First Life. You can loiter around the clubhouse for a long time after you’ve quit the game and they won’t ask you to leave. You can try to stay plugged in – going to dinner meetings, hanging about the office or the hospital or the doctor’s lounge telling war stories and basking in the experience and the camaraderie. You can just keep working, returning again and again to that bottomless font of need and drinking your fill. Dedication can be just another word for escape. Put on your white coat and you can be an emotional vampire, going room to room after sunset, slaking your thirst for validation. ![]() and it feels better than an unhappy spouse or a teething child or a mouthy adolescent. And when you meet that need, you are rewarded with love in return.Īnd who doesn’t want the love? It flows pretty freely at 3 a.m. The patients need you, the nurses need you, and the administrators (though they won’t admit it) need you. A hospital is a veritable Black Hole of need. Read the comments of people who became “addicted” to Second Life and see if you don’t spot the similarities.īut why? Why would you spend twenty hours a day roaming the halls if you didn’t have to? Why would one choose their second life over their first? The appeal of fulfillment They chose the Second Life over their First. They much preferred being in-world over the alternative. Visiting patients just to check on them – often awakening the patient to make sure they knew how dedicated they were and how much they cared. I’ve had colleagues who haunted the hospital wards until the wee hours of the morning. nondoctor), you’ve got a fighting chance. ![]() If you have a true dual identity (doctor v. Some describe retirement as shedding a skin – but when that happens in nature, the shedder still looks pretty much the same. This makes, or will make, “leaving it all behind” all the more difficult. They took journals with them to read on family vacations and called in from the exotic destinations where they had “escaped” to.Īs the insidious reach of digital medicine and the Orwellian EMR has grown, the line between in-world and the real world has blurred even further. X 24 hours a day, every day, every month, every year. ![]() I’ve known colleagues who didn’t seem to have a persona outside of their professional one. When you’ve spent most of your waking life (as well as a lot of your sleeping one) being your avatar, who are you when the screen goes dark? What happens when your “credentials” no longer allow you to Sign In? The challenges of leaving medicine Late career and retirement raise all of these questions. How many of us can separate our avatar from our actual self? How many of us simply remain our avatar even when we’re not in-world? How many of us simply can’t log off? The idea of our professional personas as avatars is particularly intriguing. But what happens when we unplug, have our plug pulled, or our career hard drive crashes due to an accident or a disability? The number of hours we spend actively engaged in playing the game is staggering. And in one way or another, they are all “in-world,” usually for more hours or days than they are not. Medical school enrollment approached 95,000. In 2020, there were more than 1 million actively practicing physicians. In 2021, there were nearly 145,000 residents actively training in the U.S. See where I’m going with this? Practicing medicine: Your Second Life In a wry twist, players are known as “residents” and, when engaged in play, one is said to be “in-world.” Those who play the Second Life game create their own characters, known as avatars. The attraction of the game was that it allowed one to create a life they chose, a life they wish they had, for want of a better phrase. In January of 2008, players spent over 28 million hours actively engaged in game play, and around the same time, an average of 38,000 people were logged in on an average day.Ī host of issues sprang up related to content, but many related to users spending more time involved in their virtual lives than they did engaged in their actual ones. In 2003, Linden Lab, a company in San Francisco, released a multiplayer online game called Second Life. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |