Doctors are necessary, but for different reasons than designers. If everyone were a doctor then the world would lack in so many other areas, meaning: doctors aren’t the only ones who help people. Everyone helps people in different ways and that doesn’t necessarily make a designer any less important than a doctor in the grand scheme of things.

If you think of the world as an interconnected whole, everyones potential is important. You were born with an artistic gift, making design a worthwhile trade for you to persue.. you would probably make a shitty doctor so it’s a good thing you aren’t one (obviously i have no factual basis for that statement but hopefully you can see my point)

The other thing to consider is how meaningful you are to the people in your life. Doctors save lives but what gives the lives they save meaning? The people that are in those lives that are being saved..

and doctors have very little time to spend with families so their lives lack in that respect. I feel that there’s a give and take, and that what makes people really meaningful has less to do with their professions as it does the relationships they create in their personal lives.

Altruistic people are and always have been esteemed, admired, glorified, etc. And they should be. Self-sacrifice and generosity are qualities we try to encourage in our children, and aspire to ourselves. This is in part why so many people deem soldiers and firefighters heroes, why news of rescue (like that man last year that jumped in front of the subway to save a stranger who fell on the tracks) get so much press. But it’s all a huge paradox; all (perhaps I should say “most” but I am willing to go on a limb and argue “all”)… all acts of selflessness are selfish at their core.

People commit acts that help others, simply because it makes them feel good about THEMSELVES. It gives their lives purpose. It boosts their self-esteem to do unto others and get appreciation in return. Even without appreciation they can still feel good just simply knowing that they are doing the “right” thing and are therefore worthwhile human beings that deserve to be on this planet. I know because I am one of these people. Helping others helps me, and I am not ashamed to admit that many of my “selfless acts” are just as much in my own self-interest as they are for the betterment of whomever I am helping at the time. This isn’t meant to devalue the acts (mine own or other people’s) but to make a point that perhaps policemen, teachers, philanthropists, and doctors are less like heroes who greatly impact lives with their sacrificial deeds, and more like cleaner fish. They nourish themselves by providing a service to other fish species by removing dead skin and parasites; both parties win, but neither party is better, or more worthwhile, than the other.

I can speak from personal and professional experience that there are many, many doctors out there who should not be considered necessary parts of the medical community. Ever.

At least once a day I question why I am torturing myself with my education. An MD/PhD is no small feat, nor is working full time as a molecular geneticist in a very fast-paced, high intensity/high yield lab. I question what my worth is to the research community, I wonder if my half-ass hypotheses are really worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing or if I’m just going to end up at yet another dead end and have to start from scratch once again.

I see my friends finishing school and going out into the world with real jobs and health insurance in their own name and a 401K and I realize that I won’t have those things for almost 10 years. I will be somewhere in my early 30s before I actually have a real job and make more than $10 an hour (this is not an exaggeration). Many of my friends are getting married and starting families and generally looking like adults. I still feel twelve years old with more education than the average post-doc. Yet again my intellectual maturity vastly surpasses my social skills. Ha.

I will never have a family, I will have less time for friends than I have now, and I will never live what most people would consider to be a normal life. But even as I question what I do and what I’m about to do, I know that there’s nothing else I could ever be professionally. I have no other talents or skills; I am not creative, I am terrible at teaching anyone anything, I’m too sensitive for Corporate America but too detached for Non-Profit. Technology and I don’t get along (a few selective pieces of scientific equipment aside), children put me up a wall, I break too easily to do anything outside…The only thing I am good at is research and medicine. Sure, I could go and be a chemist (though not an organic chemist; my scientific abilities end there!) or a physicist or an ecologist, but I would still be a “scientist” no matter what field I chose.

I envy those that have other talents and abilities outside of their field to explore. If I could think of one other thing I would like or be any good at, I would certainly take a year between graduate degrees and see what I am capable of. The ridiculously overused cliché “the grass is always greener…” seems all too appropriate here.

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Perhaps I’m the eternal pragmatist, but it simply doesn’t seem practical to me to consider the job an actor does in line with the job a medical professional does. A better example (and so I don’t sound utterly pretentious and like I’m only taking this side because of what I do for a living) would be making the comparison between civil servants and professional athletes. There are great benefits to both jobs; fire fighters and police officers protect the public and give us a sense of security, professional athletes provide entertainment for the vast majority of the population and often create a sense of camaraderie and community among fans. But if someone had a gun to your head or you were trapped in a burning building, would you rather have Pedro Garcia or a trained professional come to your aid? Professional athletes can’t save lives (now, I’m sure that there have been isolated incidents, but let’s look at the big-picture generalization, shall we?) or make your community a better place to live. Yet as a society we revere these people and see no problem with multi-million dollar salaries while the people who put themselves at serious risk every day just to keep us safe barely make more than the average manager at McDonald’s. Same goes for actors. Do they affect our lives? Sure. Are we supposed to feel connected to the characters they play or draw parallels with our own lives? Absolutely. Can a movie or a television show change your life? For some people, I’m sure this is the case. But could our society continue if they were no longer there? Without question. Some may argue that we would be just fine without police or fire fighters or doctors; we could survive by natural law and self-preservation, we could become more Darwinian and follow the laws of natural selection. An outbreak of measles? Fine, only those with fit immune systems will survive. A fire? Okay, only those cunning enough to find a way out will live to procreate. But based on our current societal norms, none of this would be remotely acceptable. Taking this into consideration, it could be fair to say that there are some professions that hold more intrinsic and moral value than others.

However, if you’d like to be all utilitarian about it, you could argue that your profession brings about the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people. As an art, it is considered a higher pleasure by Millian standards (and therefore inherently good) and because it’s a mass media, you reach a vast number of people on any given day. If your work brings them joy, or amusement, or any form of pleasurable intellectual stimulation, you have fulfilled Bentham’s Greatest Happiness Principle. If you derive pleasure from the experience of creating your art, you have also fulfilled Mill’s theory on human happiness and higher and lower pleasures and you are therefore a morally and ethically sound person. The same might not be able to be said for the “helping” professions.

Doctors, public servants, researchers, advocates – they often anger and harm a far greater number of people than they ever set out to. Doctors cannot always prevent death; sometimes they even cause it. Police officers may wound or even kill someone else in attempts to apprehend a criminal. They might arrest the wrong person or fail to stop a drunk driver. Researchers may develop drugs that ultimately do far more harm than good. They may use animal models and cause rage among animal rights groups. They might spend their entire life studying one thing and accomplish nothing for the greater good. This begs the question, what is right? Are these professions “better” because they help people and are necessary in our current society and make our microcosm a generally better place to live in? Or are they intrinsically worse because they can cause strife and anguish and pain? If they do not create the greatest amount of happiness, are they therefore amoral – or worse – immoral? Yet how can any profession that is so integral to the progress and protection of our society be immoral? How do we then determine value?

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“I…, I want to quit and do something else. I want to be such a commodity that I am needed so much that writing this drivel in this god forsaken blog and making things pretty is far less important than someone needing my help.”

Sometimes I want to slap you. I mean this in the nicest, most caring way possible, but I still mean it. You are worse than I am in the self-deprecation department and that’s quite hard to do. I’ve told you on more than one occasion that you are one of the few people who can really make me think or evoke any desire to give a zealous response and I am damn sure I’m not the only person who feels that way. You are able to express yourself through your writing and connect with people you might not otherwise be able to. We affect everyone we come into contact with, however infinitesimal that contact is. And if that effect is positive, then we’ve made a difference; we’ve “helped” in your terms. Not everyone is going to want or need your help and you are not going to be able to help everyone. I am learning that – slowly – and that realization hurts more than most would expect. What do you think you should, or could, be doing that is so much more important than sorting out your own mind and sharing a part of yourself with your friends? Saving lives? Writing epic poetry? Painting a picture that will sell for millions of dollars after you die? Do you really think that these sorts of monumental feats will really make you a greater person? If these are things that you think you should be doing or you feel you must do in order to have more value in your life, then by all means. But if you only feel like this because you believe what you are doing and who you are as a person and a professional and a friend and a son and as every other role you play in life is not as significant because you haven’t done something to smash the records to smithereens, you are entirely off-base.

We all have a god complex (or, in your case I’m thinking it’s more along the lines of a super hero complex (: but I digress…) to some extent and we all have different ways of satisfying it, but that doesn’t mean going out and changing your entire life just because you don’t feel you are doing as much as humanly possible for others. You also can’t contort and disembowel your life into something you can no longer recognize for the sake of everyone or everything else. We all have that voice telling us “this isn’t how it’s supposed to be”. I’m not supposed to be sick and looking at a drastically shortened life-span, you’re not supposed to be unhappy doing what you have always loved to do, the person next to you on the train isn’t supposed to be on the verge of losing their house because of the economy. As humans, we have very limited choices in such situations; we can live with what we’ve been given, we can rework our circumstances to make them more desirable, or we can do a complete overhaul on our life and go in a completely new direction. If you ask me, none of them sound too appealing (which explains the monotony most people seem to live in), but we all have to pick one.

How do you know you’d be happier doing something else? Being someone else? How do you know it would be better? If you are confident that something else could improve your life, that something else could fast track you towards your greater goals, then you should give whatever that might be a shot. But you have to be prepared to make sacrifices even for that. You can’t box yourself in with restrictions and requirements. This is your happiness. Seize it. But don’t lose yourself in the process. It’s a damn long road back.

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That all being said, I suppose I should say that my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt. I have been waxing philosophic for some time now and I’m just full of contradictions. Do with it what you will (:
(You did ask for a discussion, yes?)

To I don’t know what to use as a name:

My underlying point is it’s easier to see how teachers, doctors, policemen, firefighters and whoever else are helping things than say designers or (insert seemingly meaningless noncommodity job here).

This post is explaining how I feel my own profession makes me feel as well as how the people in my life make me feel.

To pocketbear:

“but if you ever want to wipe an ass i’ll let you take care of one of my patients :)”

That statement changed my mind entirely. I no longer want to be a doctor. If someone can’t wipe their own ass, they’re on their own. :-X

(I kid I kid obviously)

I do not know who you are, but I already admire you over my designer friends. Raise that poop fist high in the air!!

JULIE! Hey!

Yes, sometimes I know the people that comment are based on what they say but otherwise you are all anonymous to me.

Now that I know it’s you, in that case, I’ll let you handle all the ass-wiping.

Way ahead of you…