If I’ve learned anything from Bob Newhart and Hannibal, it’s that high-achieving psychiatrists can make a lot of money doing a minimal amount of work. So maybe you’re on the right path.
Whatever the path though, we’re glad you’re still out there and posting.
Wow… somebody resurrects my 12-year-old thread, a bunch of discussion ensues, then I post and discussion virtually dies out… I feel like my own threadkiller!
I forgot to mention that as part of my “fake it till you make it” philosophy, I was hoping med school would be like boot camp, forcing me to transform from the “lethargic, lazy bum” I described myself as in the OP into a type-A, alpha male, on-top-of-my-game, real mover-and-shaker type. I was hoping there would be so much work, I would have no choice but to completely reinvent myself. That didn’t happen, and in fact I had some academic difficulties in med school, though I did manage to graduate on time. Just a warning to anyone out there in the shoes I was in who might be thinking of doing the same thing.
I’m a bit reluctant to admit this, even behind the wall of internet pseudonymity, because no one wants there to be doctors who don’t give a crap, but, while no residency is a cakewalk, if there’s one specialty of medicine that’s particularly well-suited to being able to just “phone it in,” psychiatry is probably it. You can get a job working 9-to-5, no evenings or weekends, doing 15-minute med checks, refilling desperate housewives’ Zoloft, for $200k a year. Not that those are my post-residency career plans… :dubious:
Mind you, I’m not endorsing this, but there is another option. Steal the money.
Banks, race tracks. money trains, gold reserves, casinos, drug dens – the sky’s the limit!
High risk, but mitigated by the fact that if you get caught and sent to prison, you don’t have to work either. Win win!
I think we were hoping that over the past decade, you had figured out a way to live without working. Instead, you apparently chose one of the most difficult career paths there is.
I guess I can’t emphasize enough how I came to the conclusion that the only solution to the problem describe in the OP, was for me to fundamentally change who I was as a person. I thought if I could force myself to genuinely transform into a hard-driving, type-A badass, I would genuinely enjoy medicine and not wanting to work would no longer be a problem. I thought it would take every last bit of wherewithal I had to get into medical school–taking biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, and physics, taking the MCAT, writing admission essays, and going on interviews would be about the most I could muster, and metaphorically speaking, with my last ounce of strength I’d hurl myself over the finish line of medical school admission, before collapsing from exhaustion. From there, however, having gotten into medical school, “the system” would drag me along and force me to become the aforementioned hard-driving, type-A badass. That didn’t happen, but it’s what I was thinking at the time.
Well, I guess it’s like the old joke about “what do you call the med school graduate with the lowest GPA…”
…Doctor
I figured this out a long time ago actually.
You have to work hard for a little while. Then, invest it for interest, then live off the interest, and you’ll never need to work again.
At 1%, you need 10 mil to have an income of $100k/year.
Easy.
I heard a similar one:
What do you call a med school dropout?
A dentist.
I was thinking, if only it was the nineteenth century then the OP could roam from town to town peddling snake oil to the rubes. And now I see he’s gone into psychiatry!
I don’t know why any of you think a life of crime could be effective. Crime is a lot of hard work and carries great risk. Burglary is unremunerative, what with all those cheap Chinese DVD players out there reducing the profits of fencing. Fraud or embezzlement require you to already be in a profitable position. Mugging has bad hours. Receiving stolen goods, fencing, requires substantial investment and extensive business and criminal contacts. There’s no profit in arson or assault or criminal damage or rape or murder. I suppose you could be a hitman, but again you need extensive criminal contacts to get into that, and a predilection for violence not found in most people, including me. Drug dealing is meant to be profitable, but it’s a business and you need a supplier, so making a profit means being able to sell it for more than you buy it for, which means you need more knowledge of the drug trade than your customers, and even then you’ll always have your suppliers trying to eat into your margins.
Trust me, I’ve given extensive thought to the most efficient way of avoiding effort, and unless you’re already rich crime just isn’t the way to go.
Nor, incidentally, is investment or education or hard work, or any other form of “jam tomorrow” wishful thinking. I mean yes, it may well pay off, but it’s hard work. To me, doing twenty years of hard work through the best part of your life so you can relax thereafter seems like a stupid idea. You know, if your aim is leisure. If your aim is achievement, fine.
But that would leave you with the new problem of being a type-A badass.
Let me tell you, about ten years ago I was probably a bit younger than you, but it a similarly lethargic boat. I reached exactly the opposite conclusion: that I should stay exactly as I was. I don’t think I’ve entirely succeeded on that score, but I am just as idle as I ever was.
I did some higher education a few years ago. I didn’t have any aims for it, not to gain employment and certainly not to be beaten into shape. I did it with the Open University because they don’t require you to pay, if you’re unemployed, and don’t require to turn up in person or to have any existing qualifications. As I had no money, no transport and no qualifications that seemed quite convenient. Opening higher education to those underserved by traditional education was the original stated purpose when the government set up the Open University, after all.
I did what would have been the first half of a degree, but I didn’t finish it. It was too much like hard work, but also too easy. I don’t like doing work, so I would put it all off to the last minute then scrawl out some bullshit. The fact that this almost total lack of effort still yielded satisfactory results just reinforced my pre-existing contempt for formal education. Finding that I was enduring rather than enjoying it, and that it was very tedious, I decided to give up. On the plus side, after I passed the Latin course I took without learning a single thing I went back to the text book and actually learned how to read it. I like learning, I don’t like being required to learn things.
Like the OP I was meant to be gifted in Junior school, but I preferred avoiding work. My earliest memories are mostly of being told off for avoiding work. When I was about three, being told off for painting on my hands instead of the paper, being told off for messing about in the playground instead of delivering a message, suchlike. At my infant school there were a series of colour-coded cards to teach various aspects of simple maths, and by the end of the three years of infant school I had skillfully avoided doing any of them. To save themselves from embarrassment they skipped me to the test at the end of the first colour, and then all the other colours. So they decided I was clever. Thus through Junior school I was gifted. Then, come secondary school, I was now old enough to think for myself and realised I didn’t particularly like being around people, passionately hated anyone, such as a teacher, trying to establish any authority over me, and that all the stuff they were doing at secondary school was stuff I passionately hated, like Drama; Cookery; Art, Technology and Design; French; PE; that sort of thing. Even the maths had become both far more strict about things like showing your working, while also regressing to stuff we’d done at my primary school about two years earlier. At that point I decided that I would like to play truant on quite a consistent basis.
From that point onwards I have assiduously cultivated idleness and leisure. Luckily I was blessed with negligent family, and was stubborn enough to front out the local government. That got me to the point where I could, as an Englishman, claim the benefits I’m legally entitled to. I have been unfortunately enough to suffer periods of employment, generally pleasingly low-intensity, but I would certainly never work in a warehouse again. So I can take up my time with latin, and playing the guitar, and cycling around the local countryside, and wanking in the middle of the day, and other enjoyable pursuits.
#7 seems like your best bet.
BTW You might like the book “Doing Nothing” by Tom Lutz, I read it a few years ago and really liked it.
I was going to suggest living in a van, but I guess psychiatry would do.
Reading is thread reminded me of this.http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/alpha-consumer/2011/10/19/the-secret-to-living-well-on-11000-a-year
You forgot to mention the gin in the bottle. That’s always been my big hope.
Well you might want to google search for women who look for men with your criteria. Don’t take it for granted that no woman out there will want you for the way you are. But consider whether you’ll want a woman like that. Realistically speaking though, maintaining an american middle class lifestyle without working, sounds to say the least futuristic, that is if future turns out well, which is also somehow unlikely.
Anyway I’m very similar to you in the way you think and feel and I’ve been trying almost all my adult life to succeed it unsuccessfully. I’ve done a bit of a way though, as I managed to travel almost constantly for 24 years, working as little as possible in odd jobs. I never expected to live a mid standard of life, although I managed to do so for short periods. However now that things got harder and I got older, I seriously struggle to survive. Not conforming with the whole situation can be a way to deal with it. What ever you do, good luck.
Didn’t read this whole thread - which appears to have been resurrected at least a couple of times. But in my job I regularly encounter folk who do not work, but are supported by someone else. This ranges from young suburban adults who spend their days playing video games on mom and dad’s sofa, to the 50-yr old guy who has never worked, but has been supported by a string of women.
There are large numbers of people who live communally, with one or more of them receiving some kind of check - social security, worker’s comp, VA disability, etc. It has long since ceased to amaze me how many folk are able to exist off limited income/benefits. Of course, the quality of such a life is not what most of us would aspire to. And I often think that the effort involved in such an existence is more than it would take to simply work!
But IME, in the vast majority of instances where an adult is not working, someone is supporting/enabling that lifestyle.
Gigolo/Con-man. Are you reasonably attractive, and can you fake attraction to some 70 year old rich widow long enough to either steal her money or wait 'til she croaks and leaves it to you in her will?
ETA: Just noticed this is a 13 yo zombie. So, OP, how did your career go?
He died from a venereal disease he caught from being a gigolo ten years ago.
I think this thread is a classic!
Such a thought-provoking OP, then such a surprising outcome for the OP.
The ideas and thoughts of the posters are really great-though almost all come down
to working hard for at least a while or lowering one’s standards a lot…
Personally, I think living in a van is the best strategy so far. Though those vans I have seen tend to be really really dirty, in those cases standards have fallen too far.
So, to the OP-great thread and a wonderful follow-up. As a seasoned creator of crash and burn threads, yours is quite the opposite. Incredibly long-lasting and still short enough to read through.
Good job!
I agree, in my line of work I have a lot of patients who subsist off of SSI/SSDI, from which they get less than like $1000 per month. I always wonder how they do it, especally given how much money they spend on beer, cigarettes, and pot.
I was a bit late to the game in interviewing for jobs post-residency (naturally, I don’t want to run my own practice, as that would entail running a business–see the OP,) so I decided to do locum tenens work for a while. I’m currently doing inpatient psychiatry, making plenty of money, at a job that’s not exactly easy, but at least fairly straightforward to do. I’ve also continued to interview for permanent positions, but I’ve been fairly picky about location and income, so I havent accepted one yet.
Thanks. I’m impressed with this thread, too. I couldn’t have done it better if I tried!
If you ever get fed up with psychiatry, you could make a handsome living by starting threads. Once you figure out how to make it pay, of course.