I came across this phrase while reading Dr. Anna Lembke's disturbing and uncomfortable (yet brilliant) book, Dopamine Nation. This was referred to me by a friend whose recommendations I always take but who usually sends me books which make me uncomfortable.
Dopamine Nation is obvious in its description; pretty much everybody knows that phones are a bad thing for everybody.
Pretty much everybody knows that we're killing our children with phones, pretty much everybody knows that we live in this world of excessive abundance that is killing us all, and effectively, the snake is eating itself and looks pretty soon to eat its own head. I appreciate that's nihilistic, but the book sets it out pretty clearly, and when you look at it straight in the face, it's hard to avoid.
Lembke is a psychiatrist and treats people with all sorts of psychiatric problems, but mostly centred around hypercapitalism, abundance, consumerism, addiction, and that type of stuff. She describes patients through the book as case studies of what's wrong; honestly, some of them are really quite disturbing, but one person comes in, and she talks to the guy as he first appears, and she thinks, "Ah, he has no chance, he's never gonna make it", and she describes herself as someone now who is beyond that time in her career where she 'knew less but cared more'.
I think everybody who's worked in healthcare for a long time can probably appreciate that phrase; I definitely think that friends, family, and colleagues who are working within the NHS and have done it for a long time can completely understand it.
Altruism is easy when you're young; everybody's going to save the world. When it collides with reality and with a complex system and with the life that you're trying to build, where the work gets in the way of what you're trying to achieve, it becomes less and less easy to care in spite of the fact that your knowledge and ability to care gets greater.
This is one of the great challenges, isn't it? This is one of the great battles we now have within our NHS and probably in a wider society as a whole.
How do we keep the people who have all the experience, all the knowledge, and all the ability to diagnose and treat people properly for as long as possible within a system?
They're too expensive.
It's easy for the system to get rid of them and ship in some young guys who know less and care more, but the problem, of course, is that they know less.
Blog Post Number - 4193
Leave a comment