I never had a regular “lunch break” until recently. Early in my career it was not by choice — in surgery training there’s really no such thing as a break, only a stolen minute or two here and there to pee or wolf down whatever food you can scrounge or nap in a chair if it’s the middle of the night and you’re on call. We did get a $5 meal coupon for the hospital cafeteria which could get you a cup of terrible coffee and a bagel drier than a bag of silica gel in the Sahara desert....
For the last several months I have been experiencing something, first in the background and now very much in the foreground, and that thing is what many people would describe as a midlife crisis, although it doesn’t feel so much like a crisis mode and is in fact both exciting and exhausting, and fun and terrifying, and lots of other things. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, because I sort of thought I had already had my midlife crisis when I dramatically quit my career in my early 30s to TAKE A PRINCIPLED STAND and CHANGE THE WORLD and that from then on I would be sailing off into the sunset....
In addition to my attention span, another pandemic-related loss not immediately obvious to me (probably because I was too worried about all the other losses, like the human lives, and the general erosion of mental health, and the ability to pretend that the institutions holding up our society would be able to take care of our most vulnerable), which I am only now realizing, has been the in-between moments. The 30 minutes between leaving work and meeting up with a friend for drinks is an in-between moment....
I’m getting worn down by all the digital noise. By digital noise I mean the constant barrage of alerts, notifications, pings, email subscriptions I didn’t sign up for, email subscriptions I DID sign up for but regret doing so, all the inputs that come through my connected devices. Sometimes I secretly wish I could be one of those people who moves off the grid, abandons the smartphone, deletes all social media, and lives a quiet minimalist life in the woods....
RIP to my attention span. The world seems to be opening back up now that we are no longer surging (or are just between surges?), but I wouldn’t say that I feel normal again. Lack of focus has been one of the most pronounced negative effects. For example, I sat down with a cup of coffee and opened up a text editor to write this note about an hour ago and have since abandoned the window no fewer than seven times (see Appendix)....