Meet Casey,
For most of his life, Casey had known nothing but medicine. From undergraduate studies to medical school, through residency, and now on the brink of becoming a consultant, he had spent more time in fluorescent-lit hospital corridors than under the natural sun. The world outside his realm of scalpels and scans was an abstract concept—something he read about but never quite experienced.
Then, a change. A pause.
For the first time in years, Casey took a sabbatical. He had thought of it as a ‘refresh’ before stepping into the next stage of his career. Travel seemed like the logical choice, a chance to see what lay beyond the glass doors of the hospital. But what he discovered wasn’t a newfound appreciation for life or a deep epiphany about the human experience. Instead, he found something unsettling—boredom.
Conversations with strangers drained him. The weather. The coffee. The weekend plans. It all seemed… trivial. When people found out he was a doctor, their small talk shifted to something more predictable: How can I live longer? What’s the best way to prevent cancer? Is sugar really the devil?
He knew the standard answers, the ones that danced around absolutes—Eat well, exercise, avoid stress. But what he wanted to say was: It doesn’t matter.
He had seen marathon runners with terminal cancers. Sports enthusiasts who preached wellness struck down by autoimmune diseases. Smokers who outlived their non-smoking spouses. Alcoholics who somehow thrived into their eighties. He had watched parents who did everything “right” still bury their children. And in the same breath, he had seen reckless risk-takers, the ones who lived on the edge, somehow escape unscathed.
The truth he struggled to articulate was this: There is no formula.
As a doctor, he had learned to see death as an inevitability rather than an anomaly. Every shift had reinforced the reality that medicine, despite its triumphs, was not an elixir for immortality. He had met patients who had never smoked a cigarette, yet their lungs betrayed them with cancer. He had resuscitated trauma victims who fought their way back to life only to die from a simple infection weeks later.
He had held the hands of the dying, seen the fear in their eyes, heard their regrets. I wish I had spent more time with my family. I wish I had traveled more. I wish I hadn’t waited to be happy.
And so, sitting in a quaint café in Rome or walking through the streets of Tokyo, he found himself torn. He didn’t long for family, yet he feared dying alone. He wanted connection, yet he dreaded the conversations that came with it. He had dedicated his life to saving others, yet he had forgotten to live his own.
One evening, while watching the sunset from a small beach in Greece, an elderly man struck up a conversation. They spoke about nothing in particular—no deep philosophical debates, no discussions about health or longevity, just musings about the color of the sky, the taste of the wine, the sound of the waves.
For the first time in a long time, Casey listened. And then he sighed. The old man spoke heartily about things and experiences he found so mundane. Is that what life was? Is this how it felt to be living?
Maybe, he thought, he didn’t have all the answers. Maybe no one did. Maybe life wasn’t about outsmarting death but about making the moments in between count.
But even as he entertained that thought, he dismissed it just as quickly. The world didn’t care about sentiment. It didn’t care about meaning. He had seen people beg for just a little more time, a little more life, only to be met with cold indifference from whatever force dictated fate.
Casey exhaled, long and slow. He had spent so much time trying to make sense of the randomness, trying to decode life’s unfairness, that he had forgotten to actually live.
But could he even start now? Did he want to?
As the sky deepened into hues of violet and gold, the old man leaned back, watching the horizon. “You think too much, doctor. The only real rule in life? You live, you die. Everything else is just noise.”
Casey wanted to argue, but the words sat too comfortably in his mind. He had seen patients clutching rosaries, pleading for one more chance. He had seen skeptics bargain with the universe in their final moments.
And in the end? They all met the same fate.
Maybe the old man was right. Maybe it was all just noise.
That night, as he walked back to his hotel, he realised something.
He might never shake the weight of what he had seen in hospital rooms. He might never fully silence the cynicism in his heart. And maybe that was fine.
Maybe that was the only truth he had ever really known—that life was a game of chance, and no amount of hope or effort could change that.
He had always wanted to believe in something more. He wished he did.
But belief required faith, and Casey had none left to give.
What mattered to him most was working at the hospital and doing his best to keep death at bay for his patients.