Eric Tian

Last night, I watched Road House with a close friend. I had few expectations, but when Amazon Prime showed that it was its #1 most watched show, I couldn’t help but feel excited. We dimmed the lights, prepared food and drinks and pressed play.

Excitement soon gave way to bewilderment, then to utter confusion. From the outset the movie was not good. The female casts made no sense, the plot was nowhere to be found, and so many lines were plain awful. The only thing keeping the show afloat past 30 minutes was Jake Gyllenhaal’s acting and physique.

And that’s when I realised. Why was I taking this so seriously?

Here I was, sitting in a quiet apartment, enjoying a show with a friend undisturbed. It didn’t matter if Road House was utter trash. This moment in itself was something to be treasured, not scoured by bad accents and nonsensical dialogue.

I began watching the show as a comedy instead of an action/thriller. And it was so much more enjoyable. We cracked jokes at terrible lines, hooted at pointless scenes and cheered for the fight sequences later on. When it finished, my ribs and jaw were sore from laughter. What started out as a complete disappointment turned out to be a lot of fun.

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca once wrote. Had I continued in my critical pessimism, I would have hated Road House. But with a quick mindset shift, the evening became a memorable one. Part of the road to happiness, I think, lies in knowing when to relax and view surprising situations as a comedy. You never know how much enjoyment could result.

I pulled up next to to him on my bike. It was a cold, drizzly afternoon and both of us were wet: him with his headphones, me with my helmet. Oblivious to my presence, he was furiously typing something on his phone, which was getting wetter every passing second. So when the lights turned green, off he went, still on his phone: right into an electric scooterist.

The collision knocked him on his back and his headphones flew onto the other side of the street. The oncoming traffic ran them over in a brutal, coordinated effort: the first car crushed one side, while the second finished off the other. Later, it was impossible to tell what they had been before.

A few of us rushed to his aid. A young Asian man, a middle-aged Indian man, and myself. I instinctively got out my phone to call 000.

Miraculously, he was fine. His backpack had cushioned the fall, such that his head and hands didn’t touch the pavement.

The most striking thing about all this was his reaction. “That was close!” he yelled, watching his headphones get crushed. “I’m lucky that’s not my arm.” For a few seconds, we stood there under the rain, watching the cars drive by and gradually crush his headphones more and more. It was almost meditative: the consistent rhythm of them being run over, like bolts of orchestrated lightning.

After a while, he thanked us, brushed himself off, and ran across the light before it turned red. All this happened in less than 20 seconds.

He could have responded so differently. He could have cursed the reckless scooterist, the loss of his headphones, the incessant rain, the near miss of a serious injury. But he did none of this. Instead, he chose gratitude, laughing in the face of adversity, acknowledging that things could have been far worse. Writing this, his laughter still lingers in my mind, a reminder that silver linings are always present, and that the most chaotic moments can provide the strangest lessons.

This morning, I got ready to go to the gym and released, to my horror, that both my phone and apple watch were out of battery. I had forgotten to charge them the night prior. For a moment, I considered plugging them in and pushing my schedule back 30 minutes, but since I had plans soon afterwards, I decided to just go without my usual devices.

Here are some observations from the subsequent gym session:

1. I am uncomfortably attached to devices. I wake and sleep with my phone near me, I do nearly all my work on a laptop, and listen to audiobooks and podcasts on the fly. The apple watch I wear constantly tracks my steps, heart rate and activity levels without me even knowing. Even in the hospital, notes are typed on a computer and it is common to use your phone to quickly look up a drug dose. So this hour in the gym, with no screen or book to listen to, was mildly uncomfortable.

2. Nearly everyone else appears to be the same. I counted 9 people in the gym while I was there, and every single one either had headphones in or were on their phones in between sets. Only one person aside from me did not have headphones in, and only two aside from me did not wear a smartwatch. It seems this device abundance is universal.

3. The session became far more enjoyable. I began noticing little things in the gym: the dusty smell mixed with sweat, the lack of wet wipes, the strange angle on one of the machines, a unique haircut. To my surprise, memories from a long time ago began seeping in as well. Some I hadn’t thought of in many years. I think they were lingering in my subconscious for some time, waiting for a moment where I wasn’t occupied.

4. My workout was much more effective. With no distractions, I was able to focus intently on the exercises I was doing. As a result, I felt that I was giving them more effort and hitting unexpected personal bests. I think my usual routine of listening to audiobooks spreads my focus out too thin and leads me to lift less than I could.

Overall, this technical blunder turned out to be an illuminating experience on my dependence on devices, and what magic can transpire in the absence of them. I’m not quite ready to eliminate them as a whole (à la Cal Newport) but will actively seek out more moments of solitude in the future.

There are some things I would hate to be an expert on.

Take magic, for instance. Witnessing live magic shows used to blow my mind. I would replay tricks in my mind days after, searching for an explanation, before shaking my head in childlike wonder. Magic truly existed. The day I found out most magic tricks were some combination of misdirection, props, or sleight of hand, I was disappointed. The world became slightly less bewildering; less vibrant. The magic I once believed in had vanished.

Love presents a similar paradox. One of the saddest professions in the world is a pick-up artist, I think. Love’s beauty lies in its unpredictable, awkward nature. Being an expert in this field, knowing precisely what to say or do to elicit a response, removes its charm.

There are other examples I could list – food, movies, music, to name a few.

I do strive for excellence in certain areas. But for others, overanalysing and understanding too deeply strips away their intrinsic mystery. In these cases, I prefer the blissful ignorance of childhood.

This past week has been exhausting.

I was placed at a hospital that specialises in cancer care. Brilliant, hardworking staff work here, yet given the terminal nature of the conditions, there are very few wins to be had. This is to be expected, I guess. But there is something about rocking up every day, rounding for hours, doing all you can, knowing that most of these people don’t have much time left. Some are younger than 40.

On the last day, we wrote two death summaries. The families told us they were good deaths, and I think I understood. A single room with a large window, surrounded by loved ones, with morphine flowing through the veins. Could be far worse. But still, deaths are deaths. I had talked to one of them the previous day. It’s hard to enjoy the weekend after that.

As a result, I have had no energy to write. This morning, I woke to find I had missed three consecutive posts. What alarmed me was that I hadn’t even realised.

They say the first step to getting out of a rut is to stop digging. Only then can you change directions, and move towards a more ideal path.

Let this be a step.

In medicine, every decision carries a risk. And there are few areas where this is more relevant than in oncology.

• Surgery removes cancer cells but risks infection, bleeding, anaesthetic risks, and blood clots.
• Chemotherapy kills cancer cells but carries serious toxicities including febrile neutropenia, alopecia, and anaemia.
• Radiotherapy irradiates cancer cells but can cause long-term skin damage, fatigue, and delayed wound healing.
• Even a simple CT scan to stage a cancer has 10-20mSv of radiation – equal to about three years of background radiation.

With all these risks, it sounds easier to do nothing. A very reasonable decision. Why risk all this?

But the thing we forget: doing nothing carries a significant risk as well. The cancer progressing further. No action is still an action.

The real question is then: what risks will you bear for a given outcome? For most people, the greater the outcome – say, a complete remission – the more toxicities we risk.

The mistake is thinking that doing nothing is a safe way out. All our actions, and equally all our inactions, have consequences we must bear.

From Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way:

There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft and entitled. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he hoped to teach them a lesson. His plan was simple: He would place a large boulder in the middle of the main road, completely blocking entry into the city. He would then hide nearby and observe their reactions. How would they respond? Would they band together to remove it? Or would they get discouraged, quit, and return home?

With growing disappointment, the king watched as subject after subject came to this impediment and turned away. Or, at best, tried halfheartedly before giving up. Many openly complained or cursed the king or fortune or bemoaned the inconvenience, but none managed to do anything about it. After several days, a lone peasant came along on his way into town. He did not turn away. Instead he strained and strained, trying to push it out of the way.

Then an idea came to him: He scrambled into the nearby woods to find something he could use for leverage. Finally, he returned with a large branch he had crafted into a lever and deployed it to dislodge the massive rock from the road. Beneath the rock were a purse of gold coins and a note from the king, which said:

“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”

The prognosis: less than three months to live.

Her response, amidst tears, after expressing her wish to be discharged from hospital: “I feel unbelievably lucky. I have a lovely family I’m going home to.”

Death has a way of narrowing down what is truly important.

In the last 50 years, medicine has seen:

• Genomics and personalised medicine, allowing therapies to target an individual’s unique genome.
• Immunotherapy for cancer, making previous metastatic diseases curable.
• Robotic surgery, enabling unprecedented levels of precision with minimal invasiveness.
• Stem cell research and therapy, promoting the regeneration of cells and tissue.
• Dramatic declines in heart disease, smoking, and deaths from HIV/AIDs.
• Advancements in biotechnology, including robotic prostheses and 3D printing, allowing us to recreate broken body parts.
• Gene editing through CRISPR-Cas9, creating treatment and cures for germline genetic diseases.
• The normalisation of digital health and telemedicine, making medical care accessible to far more people.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is easy to ruminate on how our world is regressing. Harder to recognise that in a short period of time, we have progressed an unbelievable amount. Half of these things would have been utterly unthinkable 100 years ago.

There is hope in human ingenuity.

Some thoughts on political and religious volatility:

“I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.” – Nassim Taleb

“I am a libertarian with a small ‘l’ and a Republican with a capital ‘R’. And I am a Republican with a capital ‘R’ on grounds of expediency, not on principle.” – Milton Friedman

“There is no left or right, only up or down.” – Ronald Reagan

“I am a Jew by birth, a Christian by conviction, and a Muslim by culture.” – Reza Aslan

“I don’t think it’s necessary to have one religion. My family is Muslim, I went to Catholic school, my friends are Jewish, and my girlfriend is vegetarian. We study together, we pray together, we eat together. This is what religions should be doing. They should be bringing people together.” – Riz Ahmed