A) Clearly, there is a conflict of beliefs here. What you think to be self-righteous I do not. Jesus has nothing to do with this either. Are you a Christian fundamentalist by any chance? If you're a religious devotee of any denomination, please do not let it interfere with my own beliefs. I have tolerance for every belief system and religion, but when it outwardly gets thrust in my face in a negative fashion, we have a problem.
B) No such thing as inherent talents or skills? Did you take genetics? You do know that certain people are predisposed to having certain diseases, intellect, personalities, disorders, etc (with environment also contributing).....right? There are things that just come naturally to people, and genetics plays a big role in it. Figuring out what those things are and capitalizing on them would be a great goal for people to aspire to.
C) Money is not the focus here. I'll admit that I shouldn't have said "well-paying". That probably made the dollar signs light up in your head, causing you to let your tongue loose. As long as my basic fundamental human needs of food and shelter are satisfied, that's all that matters to me from the monetary standpoint. And you need to strike a balance between serving others and serving yourself. Thank the capitalist system of the USA for that. Sorry, but an element of selfishness is indeed required if you are to function in American capitalist society.
D) "Oh yeah, I also have to go to medical school" = obligation theme
Umm, read the title of this whole thread. "Anyone else suddenly realize they actually have to go to medical school?" I rest my case.
A) "Clearly there is a conflict of beliefs here, you read what I wrote and I didn't." Then you took the opportunity to pick out a very obviously sarcastic comparison to Jesus to speculate whether he is a fundamentalist Christian (???). Not sure how you got there but my favorite part was when you immediately followed up your cherry picking of the only vaguely religious reference in someone's post to say that you are tolerant of all beliefs - except, of course, when you are not.
B) "I have discovered that I am genetically crafted to become a physician and other people should figure out what they were made to." ??????????? I don't even have words for this. Sure nature and nurture play a very large role in everything but you can claim certainty in none of that unless you have a perfect record of your environment throughout your life, a more complete understanding of that knowledge than all of science, and the isolation of many "physician genes" from your genome that you had sequenced for some reason. I don't even see the point of making this one of your main points.
C) If those are your only needs then why did you say that becoming a physician was the only way that you could accomplish this? Even in the most expensive cities basic needs don't require an astronomic income provided you choose your neighborhood wisely.
C part 2) Balance? What "Balance"? You state your life's purpose is to serve others through medicine, as you have divined from the tea leaves, but then say something about needing to satisfy capitalism in order to be successful in this country??? What the actual..There is no balance in medicine. For the most important and often longest phase of the training you are giving your whole life, outside of 2-4 hours a day, to medicine. That's not balance. There's no way to balanc residency work hours into anything resembling normal life because you are at the complete and uninterrupted service of people other than yourself all of the time and even when you are not you have responsibilities to your significant other if you have one, children, etc. If you have no responsibility to others outside of your job then you are alone. That's not selfish. That's giving up a huge part of normal, daily human life for a profession. Where is the balance there? Wanting more money to strike a balance in a capitalist society isn't striking a balance, it's appeasement because you feel you needed to give something up in return for that money. Namely time and opportunity. There's nothing wrong with that but I certainly wouldn't call it "striking a balance between serving yourself and others". Medicine is others all of the time, very little has to do with you if at all.
D) But you haven't realized that you have to go to medical school. You yourself stated that you haven't been accepted to medical school yet. The thread is about accepted students feeling bewildered at the prospect of reaching a long time goal but slowly acclimating to the idea of an even longer, harder road ahead. All you did was realize that you "have" to go to medical school because it is all you want to do. I can understand wanting to do medicine over anything else in the world; I can identify with that. I think we all can. But "have to"? As in the "cosmos" is dramatically pulling our strings, dancing us like marionettes towards where we belong to be? I'm a huge fan of following the religious antagonism with outright bloody superstition, believe me, but I couldn't think of another way to come off as more conceited, self-important if not deluded.
Overall your posts make absolutely zero sense at all. I haven't been more confused since the Star Wars prequels. Literally nothing you said made any sense whatsoever and seems like it was just made up on the spot to cover up a comment that was clearly about self-involvement and the fear of losing an expected or familiar lifestyle.
If nothing else, you should at least acknowledge the irony in necrobumping a thread about finally being faced with the real life expectations of practicing medicine by throwing in some unfounded but confident sounding conjectures about practicing medicine and destiny while, simultaneously, former posters in this same thread have come back and laid their naïveté and ignorance in those years to bare for the instruction of future generations. You are doing precisely what they did all of those years ago in this thread: Hopefully, confidently stumbling in a mysterious world ahead meanwhile justifying your every step for fear of some unknown failure, pitfall in the years to come.
