The Case for Reinvention
It's worth it, even if it comes with costs
Have you seen the YouTube video by an MIT-educated neurosurgeon, Goobie, who is now unemployed and alone in the mountains (hence the title)?
Goobie explains that neurosurgeons actually perform a lot of spine surgeries and, after years of doing spine surgeries, he noticed the patients whose bodies healed from surgery shared certain characteristics compared to those whose bodies didn’t. Those whose bodies didn’t would eventually need surgery again – if not in the same part of the spine, then somewhere else.
Upon noticing the characteristics shared by successful surgery patients, he realized that surgery wasn’t actually addressing the root cause of their spine problem. This led to disillusionment, or a sort of moral injury, and he became greatly unhappy with his life. Knowing he’d die of unhappiness before he retired, he quit his job. Now he’s hiking and making videos of nature sounds, and he’s never been happier.
This single-shot video of a man in the mountains talking into a camera while swatting away an impressive swarm of mosquitoes for 48 minutes had five million views in a matter of days. As of now, nine months after it was uploaded, it has 16 million views. Clearly, his realizations struck a nerve.
Interestingly, the people who healed from spine surgery weren’t doing anything particularly radical. Goobie observed that they
ate low-salt and mostly plant-based foods
spent time in nature, in the sunshine, doing movement that caused sweating
were able to deal with stress and not let it overwhelm them
had community/were socially engaged
got seven to eight hours of sleep each night
The list offered a rough guide that he loosely adopted for his own life after quitting, thanks to all of his newfound time. He slept. He began spending time in nature, taking his once-neglected dog on hikes. He did the things we typically sacrifice on the altar of pursuing something more “meaningful” (usually work) or, at the very least, something it seems we should do, something we’re told we should want.
He understood that the meaning he’d thought was present in neurosurgery, the reward of relieving human suffering, lay elsewhere. So, he embarked on reinventing himself within a new life. He has no job, which is problematic in the long-term. He has no particular direction. But he’s happy. His life is good enough and eventually, he’ll figure the details out.
As I watched his video, I recognized much of my own process of disillusionment, of finally letting go of things I once held onto so tightly, and of re-organizing my internal self to source value in new things. This is a painful process that involves dismantling your sense of self and the framework through which you interpret the world, then incrementally building a new one. There’s a sense of deep loss and the grief that accompanies it, anger at wasted energy or time, and resentment over the state of affairs that caused your disillusionment.
It seems to me that many people, perhaps more than ever thanks to the revelatory forces of the internet, are currently experiencing this process. Some are writing about divorce and disillusionment with the institution of marriage or the church. Others are realizing the ways basic systems have failed them. Capitalism seems to have commodified everything from education and health to war (especially our time!), and it all feels hollow.
Change is harder than it looks; finding the courage and strength to pursue a life transformation takes fortitude. But I want to make the case for reinvention – for why it’s always worth it even if you end up poorer, directionless, or a “failure” by any other social metric. It’s worth it even if it gets worse before it gets better, even if it takes years to accomplish, even if no one understands your decisions. It’s worth it because simply by undertaking it, simply by being open to change and sticking with it over time, you gain real wealth.
What is reinvention? In the context above and in my own life, it refers to the choice to change a situation in which we feel trapped. That feeling of being trapped comes from events occurring or situations emerging that are beyond our control. Whether due to a lack of authority or access, we exert no real power to change the situation.
I’ve felt this situation most acutely when facing down the job market at various times. In recent years, I submitted countless carefully-tailored versions of my resume to virtually hundreds and hundreds of positions. I watched YouTube videos on how to navigate the job market, application, and interview process. And it was through the failure of my effort that I realized the problem wasn’t really me. The problem was the job market. It’s not a good time to get a job, for one, and the market I was targeting wasn’t a particularly good one even at the best of times; it was simply not going to provide a home for me.
This was a bitter pill to swallow because the alternative didn’t seem feasible. Returning to education, which has always welcomed me, involved retraining at substantial expense to teach a subject I don’t particularly want to teach. In order to go down that path, I needed time to rework my vision of self. I had to learn to see myself as someone who is capable of teaching in their second language. I had to learn to see a job teaching French Language Arts or even just French as a Second Language as good enough. I had to learn to see the value it would add as worth the effort it would take to reinvent myself. And by changing my perspective, I regained a sense of control over a situation that had long made me feel trapped.
There were, of course, many other elements playing into my sense of being stuck. The immediate ones had to do with trying to transition to a new country and being in a relationship with someone who has addiction issues. The medium-term ones involved my marriage, which took me far too many years to move on from. The long-term ones had to do with my parents, who also have addiction issues, and various traumas from my youth. Because all were collectively stoking the anxiety and stress surrounding my job insecurity, this career change became a sort of shorthand for total reinvention. That choice was a turning point in my sense of empowerment.
The choice to pursue fundamental change is never free of costs. By nature, reinvention comes at a cost that (whether we’re conscious of it or not) often proves dissuasive. Leaving a belief system or a marriage, for instance, can mean leaving behind an entire community of needed social support. Leaving behind a career can mean shedding an identity built up over many years on top of financial investment and sacrifice. Leaving alone means our money was squandered, our effort wasted, our time lost, our sacrifice pointless.
These costs shouldn’t be underestimated and I suspect the decision not to pay them is the more common one overall. They’re why we stay in unhappy relationships. They’re why we’re miserable at our jobs or in our lives. They’re why we get trapped in cycles of addiction or other self-destructive behaviours, self-sabotaging efforts to change. They’re woven into our tears, our depression, our despair, our discontent, our malaise.1 An underlying fear of change is why we resent the people in our lives, why it feels like we just can’t get ahead, why we’re chronically disappointed.
The only person who can address this fear, who can confront it and resolve it, is ourselves. This process of self-discovery involves asking difficult questions and making often-painful choices. It necessarily requires us to unpack our lives and dissect our decisions in a manner not unlike a surgeon wielding a scalpel blade over a deteriorated disc. The good news is that evidently, healing can be initiated through small, incremental lifestyle changes – from going outside to getting more sleep to reading about ways to better manage stress. Our daily habits can do much to keep us committed to our larger reinvention. After all, they’re the backbone of our lives.
When we don’t force ourselves to fundamentally change over time, I think our perspective becomes flat. Without the regular exercise of challenging our views of both ourselves and our surroundings – views about the world, about who people are, about who we should be or the way things should be, about what we can or cannot do – we knit ever more assumptions into our default perspective. It becomes harder and harder for us to imagine our lives without some amenity, some feature, some element that is, in reality, entirely expendable. Our view of our needs becomes more fixed, our preferences more rigid.
It follows that our experience of the world then becomes narrower and narrower. We become less able to look beyond differences, to conceptualize other meanings or possibilities, because we have so little practice doing so. We naturally become less interested in what those differences, meanings, and possibilities might be, less curious about other people and places. We derive increasingly limited value from what we do or see, from our interactions.
This means reinvention carries inherent value. When we imagine something different for ourselves, we ultimately become capable of engaging with the world more richly. In that light, the pain of reinvention is always worth it in the end.
For more essays on reinvention, see:
It’s not that we should never feel those emotions in life. But these emotions should be the inevitable bug, not the feature.