Most of us don’t think enough about how amazing our profession is. Being able to save the lives of our animal patients and support their families is incredible. Most other professions will never know that feeling of meaning. On top of this reality, let’s take a moment to think about the long arc of human history and the advantages we have today that those who came before us would drool over.
My wife’s grandmother passed away this year at age 98. At the time of her birth, women and people of color had basically zero chance of becoming veterinarians (or any other kind of doctor). Automobiles and radiographs were brand-new technology, anesthesia often involved chloroform, ether or nitrous oxide, and the first antibiotic (penicillin) was yet to be discovered. That was just one lifetime ago!
Today, we have:
- Climate-controlled offices.
- Artificial intelligence-generated electronic medical records that don’t require whole-building searches to locate.
- Radiographs without dip tanks.
- Veterinary specialists on video calls. (We have veterinary specialists!)
- A steady stream of new groundbreaking medications and therapies that previous generations would swoon over.
The educational and clinical resources accessible on our cellphones are exponentially greater than you could have found in a veterinary college library a few decades ago. We have never earned higher salaries, and we reap the benefits of pet owners having stronger bonds with their cats and dogs than ever before.
My friends, veterinary medicine isn’t perfect, but we have it good in a lot of ways.
Falling Out of Love With Cucumbers
But if veterinary medicine is so amazing, why aren’t we happier in our practices? The answer is the superiority of our current position relative to the past is generally not how we evaluate success.
Perhaps you heard the story or saw the video of the capuchin monkey who was happy eating cucumber as a reward for performing tasks until it saw another monkey receiving grapes (a much more desirable reward) for the same work. Upon noticing the unfairness, the first capuchin became visibly agitated and began throwing the cucumber back at the researcher in a fit of displeasure.
The footage [bit.ly/3VxSqOS] is often held up as evidence that fairness is probably ingrained in human evolution. The point here, however, is that our furry friend was content eating cucumber until he saw someone getting something better. Then he was distraught.
Human beings are no different. We are social creatures with a strong predilection for comparing ourselves to others, and these comparisons have become more extreme and continuous because we now live in a hyperconnected world. We are inundated with celebrities, acquaintances, friends and family members showing off their (metaphorical) grapes while we work away in our clinics for cucumbers.
We see celebrities wearing designer clothes in front of an adoring audience as they talk about how much fun their movie was to make. We see square-jawed finance bros taking their luxury cars to exotic locations, authors talking about how great it is to be on the bestseller list, parenting influencers making gourmet lunches their children love, and musicians dating Super Bowl-winning NFL players and singing to sold-out stadium crowds. (I’m not thinking of anyone specifically, just, you know, theoretically.) Of course, we are not doing the same work as the influencers we see online, but we are undoubtedly working just as hard as they are. Why aren’t we getting grapes? How can we be happy seeing what others enjoy all around us?
The rewards we see today can be as big as $100 million contracts for professional athletes or as small as people we know talking about the promotions they got and how much their new boss appreciates them. Of course, the people showing us their delicious-looking dinners from the restaurant their spouse pulled strings to get into aren’t trying to reduce the joy we find in our breakroom turkey sandwich. It’s hard to keep loving cucumbers when you know someone else is getting grapes. The same is true across almost every aspect of our life.
Greed Doesn’t Motivate Us
The famed businessman Charlie Munger, who died last year at age 99, once said, “The world is not driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.” He believed that people didn’t behave the way they did because they wanted to acquire more and more, but rather because they measured themselves based on what others had that they did not. There’s great truth in that perspective.
In veterinary medicine, most of us aren’t striving to be rich or work as little as possible. We do, however, notice when other health care professionals make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than us while working fewer days per week. We might feel a pang of envy when we see people spending more time with their children than we do, going on nicer vacations, wearing trendier clothes, using fancier equipment or providing treatments that the pet owners we serve cannot (or will not) afford. As I write this, I feel my enthusiasm diminishing for the cucumber I used to be quite happy with.
We are not a greedy profession by any means. As a group, we are some of the kindest, most generous people you will ever meet. Still, our generosity doesn’t mean we don’t sometimes compare ourselves to external standards. The comparisons, however, should not be how we decide whether we are happy as veterinary professionals.
What We Want Isn’t Really What We Want
One life lesson that took me the longest to learn is that people usually don’t want what they think they want. For example, most of us have desired things like a college degree, some money and a significant other. The truth, however, is that we don’t really want those things. We want the experience we imagine those things will bring.
Most of us don’t want an advanced medical degree. Instead, we want the experience of practicing medicine, learning more about something we are passionate about, and feeling confident in delivering a diagnosis or treatment. Or maybe we think that if we had this one final academic certification, we would finally experience making our parents proud of us (or possibly no longer care what they think).
Perhaps if we had some money, we would experience feeling safe, fitting in better in our nice neighborhood, or having the freedom to do what we want.
If we had a significant other, we would experience feeling loved, knowing our self-worth, or having a best friend to spend our lives with.
You get the idea.
Regardless of the target of our envy, the real motivator is the experience we believe the target will provide us. Once we understand it, we can often skip the envy part and focus on creating our desired experience. Maybe we don’t need the advanced degree to feel confident — a robust mentorship program and a lot of practice could give us that experience. Perhaps we don’t need a pile of cash to live life with a sense of freedom but rather to block time for weekends away. What if we don’t require a significant other to decide we are someone who has value and is worthy of love?
The lesson here is that life inside and outside practice is not formed by what we have or see other people doing. Our life is formed by our experiences, and we have immense power over them.
One Experience at a Time
I was halfway through dinner when my youngest daughter started a conversation in the strangest way. She looked at me and said, “Why do you think that happens?”
I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly, I realized my wife and oldest daughter were looking at me expectantly. It seemed this was not the start of a conversation. The family communication had been going on for some time, and I had been lost in my thoughts, worrying about a case I had seen a few days earlier.
The rest of the table obviously was having a different family experience than I was. I could have experienced the dinnertime conversation, but I didn’t choose it. Instead, I chose a stressful alternative experience in which I decided to imagine all the things that could go wrong based on choices I made at a clinic that wouldn’t be open again until the next morning.
It’s important to remember that we can experience only one thing at a time. We can’t simultaneously experience work stress and a fully engaged conversation with loved ones. Similarly, we can’t feel proud of the diagnostic plan we put together while feeling envious of the beach body our neighbor is showing off on Instagram. At that moment, we can’t feel both gratitude for the caring people we work with and simmering anger at the client who was nasty yesterday. We get to experience only one thing at a time, and every moment is a choice.
The Key to Keeping a Joyful Perspective
We have almost no control over what other people do, possess or say. We can’t control the future or change the past. The things we see on social media or out in the world might as well be forces of nature. If we let those external factors decide how we feel about veterinary practice, we will always be boiling with anger over the cucumber we used to be happy with.
What truly matters in life and practice is what we focus on and the experiences we choose. Of course, there will be unpleasant external factors that we can’t ignore. When it comes to how we value our days, however, we don’t have to pay attention to what others are doing, saying or experiencing. We can choose to focus instead on what we decide is important to us. Often, that’s the mundane. It’s participating in the conversation in the breakroom instead of scrolling on our phones. It’s deciding to be proud of the surgery we performed instead of fuming because others are at the swimming pool with their kids. It’s reflecting on our conversation with the wonderful client instead of the upset one.
We can make enormous strides in practicing in one of the world’s most incredible professions by focusing on the experiences that reinforce the reality. We can escape the firehose spray of comparison and envy that makes so many people unhappy if we recognize that what we experience in life is largely within our control.
DID YOU KNOW?
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cucumbers, tomatoes, avocados and zucchini are classified as fruits because they are the fleshy plant part surrounding seeds. “However, for nutritional and culinary purposes, these foods are considered to be vegetables rather than fruits,” the USDA stated.