When I was younger, July 4^th was always marked by a family trip to the rodeo to watch buckin’ broncos, police-dog chases, and the usual parade of fireworks and antics that Coloradans generally find entertaining. Since I moved away [for college and med school], July 4^th has been a day of deep contemplation for me. I usually find myself idle with nothing to do; and when I have nothing to do, I start psychoanalyzing myself to the extreme.

Seven years ago, to the day, I went thru the most severe existential crisis of my life. As far as existential crisis’s are concerned, my understanding is that you are supposed to have them in your early 20s, when you’ve just graduated from college and have no idea what to do with your life. Being as weird as I am, I decided to have mine at age 15. In my diary, I appear to have titled the entry as “The worst day of my life.” In retrospect, that statement seems a bit histrionic, but I was a teenager, so what can you really expect? I was in Cambridge, MA that summer – living at MIT and doing some oddball research with headless zebrafish at Harvard. In this setting, I found myself spending the entire July 4^th holiday puzzling over the “What do I do with my life?” question. My response, in part:

“What do you want to do with your life? I know. I want to make other people happy so that I can be happy. I want to help people. I want to be the best type of person I can be. I want to lead a good life, stand up for what is right.”

When I look back at this moment, I always find myself both embarrassed and in awe of the simplicity of my thought. The unhappiness of that day came, I think, from an inability to define how exactly to “make people happy” or even how to figure out what, in this confusing world, is “right.” Seven years since, I can’t really say that I’ve arrived much closer to the Truth. I feel like I still live by the same core values [which is to say, I believe that the purpose of my life is to increase the general sum of human happiness] but the how and the what are still anyone’s guess.

Today, the winds of caprice are telling me to become a Chinese Massage Therapist. I’m serious. I’m telling you, if you want to master the art of sending a person to heaven and back, this massage therapy is something to look into. I got a massage this afternoon and, dude, I feel better than great.