My Life Plan After Quitting Medicine in My 30s19 min read

All right, so I spent 10 years becoming a doctor, and now I’ve quit. My name is Zach. I’m 30 years old, and I was an internal medicine doctor working and living in Boston, but 6 months ago, I left medicine forever and now live in Pennsylvania.

Now, after the shock period, I wanted to share what my experience has been like since leaving and my future plans.

I thought it would be helpful to those facing a career change or other medical people who are considering leaving to share how I’ve been feeling and thinking since I left, my plans, including finding a job and where I’m going to work, and, of course, my reaction to some the internets reaction of my quitting medicine 1-hour video.

Disclaimer: it’s just going to be me talking extremely big-headedly about my life and my plans. So, if you’re here for some evidence-based tips on health or wellness or productivity or how to fit more marshmallows in your mouth than anyone on the planet Earth, that will be next week’s post.

Let’s start with my thoughts on the internet’s reaction to me leaving medicine.

Leaving Medicine

The Internet’s Reaction

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has emailed me, commented on my previous videos, and supported me after I quit medicine. It seems I’ve polarized people. Many seem to really like me, and many, well, don’t.

I have had an outpouring of supportive emails and comments. About 14 people have offered to host me in their houses in various parts of the world, or one particularly interesting person even asked me to become their “primary doctor” and help them treat their cancer (which I definitely am not qualified and should not do, I recommended they reach out to their local oncologists). On the work front, people have offered me significant jobs and sponsorship deals, all of which I’ve rejected at this point as I’ve decided what I am doing next, but I am very grateful for all of these opportunities and all of you. Seriously, you all have opened up a secret door, a secrete passageway, that I never thought existed in life, and, now that I’ve stepped through, the pure beauty of it all, this life, the connections, the people, the freedom, the confidence, the happiness, almost brings me to tears. ALMOST.

Now, with such a positive response, there has been, of course, the other side.

For the first time ever, I have people who repeatedly angrily email me, comment, or say things like, “You are dumb and the problem with humanity,” kinda harsh, right? Or something in that tone. Now, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. It was just interesting and exciting because I hadn’t really had “real” haters before, but now I do! Does that mean I got some YouTube achievement or something? 

The most interesting, unexpected, and likely beneficial thing that came as a result was multiple discussions about the current state of medicine and what it’s like (good or bad) practicing as a clinician.

However, many med students messaged me within 24 hours of the video asking, “Should I quit too?” I fear that I made some up-and-coming doctors, medical students, and high schoolers not want to practice medicine, which was not my intention and saddened me.

My goal for the video was to tell a highly personal story in hopes of helping other people who may be feeling similar or in a tough place. Leaving medicine, to me at least, felt taboo like no one ever did it like I was a “bad” person for doing it. When now, I realize I would have been a “bad” person for staying with it (due to becoming a zombie and being a checked-out doctor, not truly being with and helping patients). Oh, the zombie thing, let’s talk about that too.

So, my main point of the video was asking myself if the ‘juice was worth the squeeze,” as my mentor Dr. Okusanya asked me on my podcast. A few months into residency as an Internal Medicine Doc in Boston, I realized it wasn’t worth the squeeze and quit. At one point, I realized that if I stayed a doctor, I would become a zombie. I want to clarify what I said about being a “Zombie” in medicine. 

I think medicine is an AMAZING field to go into or be in, and I am NOT saying everyone who goes into medicine becomes a Zombie. The biggest mentors in my entire life are practicing, world-changing clinicians. As physicians, we are truly privileged to have had the opportunity to be with people who are in the crucible of their lives. No one, no one at all, experiences something as unique as being with people as their doctor during this time. My advice to those newer medical students or doctors is not to fade away but to lean in.

What I was saying, or trying to say, was that if I stayed practicing clinical medicine, I would 100% become a Zombie. And life is too short.  The only question you need to ask yourself is, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”  But I can’t answer that question for you.

Finally, my particular life situation is quite different from many people’s. I was and am extremely lucky human because of the location I was born and who my parents are. I was born in a safe and nice area on the East Coast of the USA, and, financially, my parents paid for all of my education, so I was left with no debt. Also, my parents are amazingly supportive and just great human beings; without them, none of anything I did would have been possible.

Then, YouTube amazingly changed my life and gave me a decent financial cushion to live on for a few years; it gave me the breathing space to leave medicine when I did. In fact, other than YouTube, I’m pretty much taking this entire year “off,” which I’ll talk about in a bit. But I wouldn’t have been able to support myself doing that without YouTube and having no debt. 

However, this “YouTube money,” at least what I’m making right now, is definitely not enough money to live on for the rest of my life, and I realized that when I was in the process of quitting medicine. Also, regardless of money, I didn’t want my life to be only YouTube (for now). So, as soon as I knew I was leaving medicine a couple of months into residency, I was networking and looking at career options, as well as seriously considering the full-time internet creator thing and secured job offers to give me a “safe” financial path after stepping out of the hospital for the final time. 

How I feel

So, how do I feel, or how have I felt in the 6 months since I left? Well, in the first month after leaving, I talked about it in my long 1-hour video, but I was just recovering.

I didn’t realize it, but I was operating at about 20% on battery-savings mode. My brain wasn’t firing fully, nor was my physical body. It took me a full month to simply charge back up by sleeping, eating, exercising, and being with family.

After that, some worry and stress began to creep in. I am a very strategic and planning person. And when I don’t have a plan, I get stressed.

Funnily enough, when things don’t go according to plan, I react fairly well. But I’ve noticed that not having any plan in my brain is akin to trying to turn a cogwheel in the opposite direction.

It creaks, and grinds, and resists. In fact, something I’ve been desperately trying to do is be okay with spontaneity and randomness and actually integrate those things into my life without considering the next 10 years of my life. You should see me on spontaneous dates… a ROUGH sight… But that is a whole other post.

So, around month 1 of leaving, I seriously was evaluating about four different options and was becoming hella stressed because I didn’t know which one I wanted to do. I made a huge post on different non-clinical career options after medicine that I’ll link that includes salary, hours, and more, but, basically, I was plus/minusing everything on that list until, after about one month of deliberation, I decided to just go with my gut.

Once I decided, I felt much better (I’ll talk about those plans at the end of the post). But that means I essentially had a “year off,” so what the heck have I been doing, and what do I plan to do?

A year “Off”

So, 2 months after leaving residency and leaving medicine, I secured a job that started in 10 months. So, this meant I had about 10 months left of time “off” to do literally anything.

I jumped immediately into YouTube, planning 12 videos at a time, creating a new course, thinking about a book I might write, or trying to learn how to code. But it was too fast, too soon.

It was like I didn’t warm up before soccer and twisted my ankle. I had actual headaches. I didn’t feel good about the work I was doing, and honestly, with YouTube videos and posts from late 2024, I think it showed.

So, I decided to take a step back and think more seriously about what I was doing.

In month 3, I started to think seriously about what I wanted this year to be. I did some heavy journaling sessions where I reviewed every single journal entry for the past year and did a 6-hour “Year Compass worksheet”. I also read a fantastic book called Time Off, where they argue not so much about the length of time off but more about the idea of integrating a rest ethic into your life. How proper rest fuels creativity, cleans your brain, and might even be the purpose of life.

In fact, to sidetrack a little here, the Ancient Greeks and Romans thought “Noble Leisure” was more important than work. Aristotle thought leisure was defined entirely by itself, as it wasn’t a means to an end but simply a means that stood at the top of the hierarchy of life.

It wasn’t until the 14th century, or 2000 years after the Greeks and Romans, that clocks and using them to keep time were even standardized. In the 14th century, humans started to put clocks in public centers and church towers. 

Time became widely known and widely tracked.

Productivity isn’t a hot trend now, it was all the rage about 300 years ago in the Industrial Revolution when time became a valuable currency that could be traded for money (workers time) and leisure’s value declined rapidly.

Leisure became seen as wasting value because time, or hours at the factory, was money.

In the 19th and early 20th century, this was such a craze that working 10-16 hour days, 6 days a week, was the norm. It wasn’t until Henry Ford in the 20s introduced the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek (what we use now) that things ever slowed down again after ramping up.

And, no, he wasn’t just being a “nice guy.” He was trying to attract the best workers he could and steal them from competitors.

So, what I’m trying to say is through our entire Human Era (or about 12,000 years as defined by anthropologists when humans began settling into farming communities from the hunter-gatherer lifestyles, known as the neolithic revolution), humans haven’t been so conscious of our time and productivity and “getting the most done” until the industrial revolution about 200 years ago, or a less than 2% of our entire existence as a civilized species. So, can we be sure “working harder” is the best thing to do? I’m not sure. Seriously, I’m not saying leisure is the best thing, but is driving as hard as possible the best thing? I think we are still off on the spectrum of leisure to work, or at least I was.

All this to say, I struggled to plan my leisure (relaxing) vs my work (YouTube and business stuff).

I quickly went off the rails again into super hard work mode after I read the 12-week year, which I still think is great, but I completely overestimated the work I could accomplish on a weekly basis, and my brain still wasn’t ready.

The book essentially has you outline your big vision in life and break down the big goals into smaller goals until you create a 12-week goal, which you then break down into weekly goals, which I broke down into daily goals. I was so pumped up I was planning too much stuff that I didn’t accomplish and then was disappointed when I didn’t accomplish them because my tasks were stacking on one another. And here is where i realized I was being silly, I had created these tasks for myself! I was being a mean manager of myself! Didn’t I quit what was draining me to find something that wasn’t draining me? What was going on in my brain?

Ok, last Greek reference I promise: There was this ancient and big and powerful Greek god Chronos who is depicted as the father of time, and he symbolizes measure time. He is the god we all worship aggressively daily without realizing it: the God of time. But, then, there is this less well-known god, Kairos, who is the youngest son of Zeus and was believed to be the spirit of opportunity. 

In the book Time Off, they describe the two gods’ aesthetics very differently, Chronos being a god who was an old, wise-looking man with a big grey beard and Kairos who was bald except for a sharp point of hair sticking out like a foot from his forehead which can only be grabbed from the front. And you can only grab him as he approaches you because when he passes you by, he is so quick that it’s impossible to pull him back.

Children are like Kairos all the time, getting lost in activities like building snowmen or playing make-believe, as opposed to us adults, yuck, who are very much like Chronos, coordinating our every minute, stressing out about being late to meetings because we live in the “real world.” And isn’t it funny how the more we track our time, the faster it seems to disappear?

When’s the last time you spent a whole day at the beach doing nothing, no books, no phone, just you and the sand and the waves? Maybe you go for a swim, or have a chat, or go for a walk, or build a castle! I did this one day recently, and the day felt like it lasted forever, but in a great way! Then, the next day, when I got back home, I had my Deep Work sessions planned, my exercise, and my reading, and the day felt like it had disappeared in two seconds!

Many modern-day Greeks think the key to a long life is living more like Kairos and less like Chronos, not paying attention to clocks, being spontaneous, and living outside of the “real” world. What I desperately wanted to do was integrate more Kairos into my life. 

With all that in mind, I decided, for month number 4, I would go to the Caribbean, be on a beach, and seriously not plan anything. Just read, explore, and see where the day takes me.

I failed on week number 1, planning and working on projects that ran a little over. But on week number two, I committed. I was bored at firs,t but then I fell into a pattern. I left my phone in the room before I left for the beach around 7 am and didn’t pick it up again until I came in after sunset,t around 5 pm. It felt refreshing. Just sitting. Just watching. It was like something I had never done before. I was so aware of other people, and myself, and the sounds of everything. But, around week 3 the gears in my mind were creaking, they wanted to plan! To do! And at the end of that third week, they couldn’t take it anymore, and I flew back home a week early to start doing things again.

Now, when I arrived home, I realized I desperately needed that break. I felt good. I felt like I could do better about integrating a “rest ethic” into my daily and weekly life. And I did, and for two months, it’s been going very well. In fact, I’ll tell you something: this lifestyle is great. Maybe too great. Basically, I wake up early, around 4:30, exercise, and do work with intermixed relaxing (like 1-hour walks and lunch and two breakfasts), and then start relaxing and reading and working out again around two o’clock; oh, the work stops at 2 o’clock. 

I’m getting the best sleep I’ve ever gotten in my life, I’m exercising and gaining weight (it’s usually hard for me), I’m near my family, I’m traveling, I’m exploring myself, and I’m more productive than I’ve ever been (which I can probably attribute to the time I have off, but, it just feels like better work). I’ve:

• Written a Book
• Expanded my YT team
• Read 30+ books
• Put on about 10 lbs
• secured an amazing job
• Felt better than I’ve ever felt.

And that brings us to right now. For the next 6 months, I will do more of the same. I am planning about four more two-week adventures to places like Hawaii, Portugal, and Spain because I have to take advantage of this time, right? What’s the point of going crazy saving money if I (hopefully) will earn more as I get older (an idea from Die with Zero)? Also, I want to take these trips and go on these adventures while I still have this relatively amazingly free life with few commitments and I am physically healthy.

But, more importantly, I’m very happy having mostly relaxed days with some morning work. Much less phone time. Consistent wake and bedtimes. Good food. Lots of exercise. More saunas and cold plunges. Long chats with friends. Long dinners with friends and family. Much more reading (this reading thing really is a game-changer). Much more being bored and sitting with my thoughts and much more asking myself “why” in the moment.

It seems to be working pretty well. In fact, so well that I’m scared to enter the real world, to have a real job, to do “adult stuff.” I was talking to a friend on the phone the other day, and she asked me, “Zach, what do you actually do?” And I said, “A little of this, a little of that, I just go where the day takes me. Honestly, I have no idea what I’m doing overall.” I think Kairos would be proud.

Ok, so what’s next? What happens when this “year off” comes to a close?

My next plans

So, as I said at the beginning of this video, I secured a job. And not just any job; among all the jobs I was looking at, this was the biggest reach and my first choice, and somehow, I pulled it off. It was not easy, but I am very excited about this new world I’m going to enter. I don’t want to be too specific because I’ll reveal the exact job and where I’m moving in another post (sorry), but what I will say is this is the big corporate world. A job that will have intense hours, be fast-paced, and be in one of the busiest cities in the world.

I’ve signed the offer. So, sometime in the summer, I’ll be moving to this city, and then, in early Fall of 2025, I’ll start it.

I feel excited about it, and it’s satisfied the part of me that says, “YOU NEED A PLAN,” but another part of me is really happy with the life I am living right now. To quote Derek Sivers, because I recite this in my head all the time, “Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?”

I’m happy, I’m helping people, most of them are happy (some of you really are not, lol), and I am profitable. But is it enough? That last part is a sticking, egotistical, big-headed part for me. Part of me wants to go for more, more, more, bigger, bigger, bigger, yet the logical part of me that reads a ton of research on this stuff knows more, more, more, and bigger and bigger doesn’t necessarily mean happiness. It’s just the hedonic treadmill.

Looking back, I’ve realized that life isn’t just about hitting milestones or having everything perfectly planned—it’s about finding a rhythm that actually feels good. These past six months have shown me how important it is to slow down, let go of the constant need to be productive, and just exist for a while. I’ve learned that some of the best things happen to me when I’m not trying to force them and when I’m not obsessing over what’s next. I know crazy productivity-driven and somewhat manic Zach will take over at times, but I don’t want to lose sight of the other Zach whom I’ve found in these quieter, more unstructured moments. It’s a balance I may struggle with for the rest of my life, but I am so happy I’ve begun to try and figure it out. And lucky you guys, you get to sit here while I try to figure it out! You poor, poor sods…

Thanks so much for reading and sticking with me! Love you all!

Zach