The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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It seems that you seem particularly concerned that India is doomed and will become hellish very soon due to mass automation and there’s nothing you can do other than escape, which you are unsure if you can (at least to the US) “in time” before this apocalypse occurs. I suppose I’m just not sure that hell awaits all Indians as a result of mass automation, and I’m even less sure that people of your class are going to pay the price if that hell awaits any large percentage of them. Certain doom for India isn’t guaranteed, I think, or necessarily even very likely. You and your girlfriend can live a very decent life in most of the UK as two doctors, even by middle class American standards. And mass automation, if it upends social systems, will upend many classes of worker before doctors, so whatever ultimate solution emerges will likely exist before your profession ceases to.
Perhaps your depression stems from another source than this supposedly inevitable AI-driven doom cycle?
I am concerned about near-term collapse in India, but it's by no means the only reason I'd be unhappy living here. While my family is now quite well off, we're far from the fuck you money needed to ensure stability if everything else falls apart around you. But I simply dislike living here, for what that's worth.
It isn't just the money, practising medicine in the UK has plenty of other issues. I strongly suggest you visit /r/DoctorsUK and sort by top for a year, it's deeply atypical for the majority of doctors to be that deeply unhappy/pissed, certainly when they're regularly striking over the course of a year.
i'm still going there, it's an improvement, if not a Pareto one, I just deeply wish I had better options already in hand. Let's see how it shakes out, as much as I might kvetch, I'm still committed to trying.
Almost certainly, I've been depressed for what, 7 or 8 years now? Well before AI risk was more than a theoretical concern. It's a bitter cycle of me having plenty of real reasons to feel sad/unhappy/frustrated, and the pre-existing depression only saps me of the will to do much about it. Worse, some issues like the one preventing me from currently giving the USMLE were unknown unknowns, I had no idea at the time that what I thought was a relatively inconsequential decision in terms of my med school would cause this much suffering, since I expected that despite it being mediocre at best I could just apply myself harder and get something better as a postgraduate trainee.
Oh well, I'm not dead yet, and I'm still rolling.
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