A few years ago, I sat across from a general surgeon at a conference dinner. He had just wound down to two days a week after thirty-one years of operating, and when I asked him what he was doing with the rest of the week, he laughed in a way that was not really a laugh.
“Sleeping,” he said. “Watching a lot of golf. Not playing it. Watching it.”
He was six months in. He looked worse than he did when he was cutting five days a week.
I think about that dinner more than almost anything else I’ve heard from a reader or a colleague, because it is the outcome everyone in the FIRE community forgets to plan for.
We spend years arguing about withdrawal rates and asset location and whether 25x is enough. We build spreadsheets that project out to age ninety-five. And then a physician hits the number, walks away, and discovers he has no idea what to do on a Tuesday.
Medicine trains the hobby out of you
This is less of a character flaw and more of a predictable output of the physician pipeline we all went through. These days, I think it applies to almost everyone working a highly charged career.
Premed selects for people who will sacrifice everything else for one goal. Medical school rewards it. Residency makes it mandatory, because there genuinely aren’t enough hours to keep a life going alongside eighty-hour weeks.
By the time you’re an attending, you’ve spent a decade being told, mostly implicitly, that anything you do that isn’t medicine is time you stole from medicine.
So the hobbies go first. The instrument gets sold. The bike goes in the garage. The friendships that weren’t formed in a hospital quietly lapse. And what’s left is a person whose entire identity, social circle, sense of competence, and daily structure all come from a single source.
That’s a concentrated position. We’d never allow it in a portfolio, but we allow it in a life without blinking.
The trouble shows up in two places. The first is burnout, which for a lot of physicians is not really about hours. It’s about hours plus nothing else. When work is the only thing giving you a sense of mastery and meaning, a bad stretch at work becomes an existential event. There’s nowhere to put your weight while the ground shifts.
The second is the day you stop, whether that’s full retirement at fifty-two or the moment you cut back to part time. All the structure disappears at once, and if nothing was ever built alongside it, nothing is there.
The empty nest and the empty days
Here’s the part that makes the timing especially cruel for physicians, and I say this as someone whose daughter is still small enough to think my job is boring and my dog is interesting. (She’s also more interested in the cats we just adopted)
Doctors start families late. Training pushes children into your thirties, sometimes later. Which means the kids leave for college right around the same window when you’re finally financially able to step back, and often right when your parents are needing more from you, and right when your body is making it clear that the overnight shifts cost more than they used to.
Two of the three pillars go at once. The career you organized your identity around, and the parenting you organized your calendar around. Both gone inside a couple of years.
I’ve watched colleagues hit that intersection with nothing but a house that’s suddenly too quiet and a call schedule they no longer need. Some of them pick up more shifts, which everyone congratulates them for, because working more is the one coping mechanism medicine will never question. It is a socially approved way to avoid the problem.
The people who come through that window well, in my experience, all have one thing in common. They didn’t start building the rest of the life at the moment they needed it. They’d been building it for years, badly and inconsistently, in the margins of a very full career.
What my hobbies look like
Mine are cooking and landscape photography, and I want to be honest about how unglamorous the beginning was.
The cooking started because I was eating garbage on nights and felt terrible. I learned to make three things well. Then five. Then I got obsessive about technique in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever memorized a treatment algorithm. Why does a sauce break. What is happening when you rest a piece of meat. Why does every good version of this dish start with the same four aromatics. Cooking, and especially baking are science to me, so you can imagine the appeal.
The photography started because I was traveling for the food and wanted better pictures than my phone was giving me. Then it became its own thing, and now it’s the reason I’m awake at 4 a.m. in a national park somewhere, which my wife finds funny given how much I complained about pre-rounding.
What surprised me is how much they feed each other and how social they turned out to be. I travel to eat, I photograph while I’m there, I come home and try to reproduce something I ate in a market in Oaxaca, and then I invite six people over to eat the third attempt. Prints on the wall. Friends at the table. It works.
That last part matters more than the hobbies themselves. Cooking gave me a reason to host, and hosting gave me a social life that has nothing to do with the hospital. When I have a genuinely bad week clinically, and I still do, I am not going home to a house where the only topic available is the bad week.
Two hobbies also gave me an on-ramp and an off-ramp. Photography demands travel, planning, early mornings, and a fair amount of money. Cooking demands a Tuesday evening and whatever is in the fridge. When I’m depleted, I still have something. That’s the design principle worth stealing, and it’s the whole reason for the menu below.
A menu of hobbies, sorted by what they cost and what they pay
The mistake burnt-out physicians make is picking the ambitious one. You’re exhausted, you decide the answer is to learn Portuguese and run a marathon, you last eleven days, and then you conclude you’re just not a hobby person.
You’re not a hobby person because you picked something with an activation energy you don’t currently have. Match the hobby to the tank you have, not the tank you wish you had.
It also helps to be clear about what you want back. Different hobbies pay out in different currencies:
- Restoration. It quiets your head. Value is that you’re a functioning human the next morning.
- Mastery. A skill that visibly improves. This is the one that most directly replaces what medicine gives you.
- Social. It puts you in a room with people, ideally people who don’t work in a hospital.
- Physical. Keeps the body capable enough to enjoy the money later.
- Network or income. It compounds into something. Some hobbies become consulting work, a business, or a second act. Or keep the loneliness at bay.
None is better than the others. But if you pick three hobbies that all pay out in restoration, you’ll be very calm and very isolated.
Higher energy: time, money, or planning required
| Hobby | What it demands | What it pays back |
| Landscape or travel photography | Trips, early mornings, gear, patience | Mastery, travel structure, something to show for it |
| Cooking seriously (not just dinner) | Two to three hours, a real kitchen | Mastery, social, a reason to host |
| Endurance sport or lifting | Consistent weekly hours, a schedule | Physical, restoration, a built-in community |
| Woodworking, restoration, mechanical projects | Space, tools, meaningful money | Mastery, tangible output, deeply absorbing |
| Music with other people | Practice plus a standing commitment | Mastery, social, humility |
| Teaching, coaching, or volunteering | Regular slots, emotional bandwidth | Social, network, meaning that doesn’t require a badge |
| Learning a language properly | Daily practice over years | Mastery, travel, cognitive upside |
Lower energy: for depleted weeks and post-call days
| Hobby | What it demands | What it pays back |
| Baking, one recipe repeated | Ninety minutes, minimal thought | Restoration, something to bring to work |
| Reading fiction (not another finance book, sorry) | Twenty minutes or as long as you want | Restoration, and it turns the analytical part off |
| Gardening or houseplants | Small, recurring, forgiving | Restoration, physical, visible progress |
| Walking with a camera or a podcast | Whatever you’ve got | Restoration, physical, no setup cost |
| Board games or a regular card night | One evening a month | Social, low stakes, easy to sustain |
| Sketching, painting, or writing | A notebook and no audience | Restoration, mastery over time |
| Birding, fishing, or anything that requires sitting still outdoors | A morning, cheaply | Restoration, physical, unexpectedly social |
Build a small portfolio. One high energy hobby that will still be interesting in twenty years, one low energy hobby you can do the night after a brutal shift, and one that reliably puts you around other people. Three is enough. The overlap between them is where the good stuff happens.
Start now, while it’s inconvenient
The argument I hear most is that there’s no time, and that it’ll be easier later.
It won’t. The habit of building a life outside medicine is itself a skill, and it takes a few years of clumsy practice. If you wait until the day you retire to develop it, you’re starting at zero, at the exact moment your confidence, structure, and daily social contact have all just walked out the door.
A hobby you’ve had for fifteen years is a place to stand. A hobby you started last month is another chore.
You don’t need to be good at it. My first year of photographs were unusable, and my first attempts at anything with a pan were embarrassing. That’s not a reason to wait. That’s just what the beginning of a long thing looks like.
