Something of a Rorschach test, this one. Do you see, in the video below, a) a nurse exhibiting all the compassion, stress, care, and love that makes up a modern western health service? Or b) the intolerable modern compulsion to go viral at all costs, even if it means exploiting a patient’s death to do so?
Consider me well, and truly, in camp “b”. If I ever die, as, sadly, I suspect I might, then the nurses have permission to make one of these only if they preface the video with a five minute obituary saying how fiendishly clever and handsome I was, and how much humanity – and in particular, womankind – has lost from my passing:
— nikki (@ateenyalien) July 2, 2022
“This is what happens when you go into medicine because you watched too much “Holby City””, remarked a friend, on seeing the above.
Consider, if you will, all the elements that go into creating that video. You have to set up the camera, and get the angles just right to cover your instantaneous and entirely spontaneous reaction to the death of an unnamed patient.
Then you have to do the editing. Add the uplifting music, in this case Adele warbling in her inspiring way about “showing you just how strong I am”, which is intended, clearly, to refer to the living nurse rather than the dead patient.
Then you have to add the subtitles.
Note, in the subtitles, how the nurse, not the patient, is “centered”, to use the modern vernacular. The poor dead patient gets a single line at the beginning of the video. We learn no more about them other than that they have died. Everything else is about the apparent injustice facing the true heroine of the story – the nurse. Note that she has to work “5 more hours”, for example.
Well, what’s the alternative? Go home because a patient died? What about…. all the other patients?
I was on Ewan MacKenna’s podcast last week, though the episode has not yet been released, and we had a long chat about precisely this phenomenon: The modern compulsion to perceive oneself as the first-person-protagonist of the whole world.
It might be expected, for example, that a person who enters a career in medicine will witness some deaths, including some upsetting ones. More to the point, it might be expected that a person entering that career would understand that death cannot be stopped, just delayed. We obviously want to see compassion and decency in our medical professionals, but, at the same time, a medical worker who resents having to work the rest of the day when a patient dies is not much use to anybody. To put this in simpler terms: It’s not all about you, love.
What’s more: How much compassion and decency is there even in this video, really? The video was clearly not made as a memorial to the departed patient. They don’t get a mention. Their life, it seems, meant nothing except in so far as its ending impacted the emotions of this nurse. Is it easier to believe that the nurse is, at this moment, at home mourning the loss of the patient, or that the nurse is at home checking her phone every five minutes watching the video views and likes mount up?
Perhaps, the kinder and gentler souls amongst you might argue, this is just the nurse’s way of coping with the stress of her job, and, if so, what harm in it? If 25,000 supportive messages from strangers at the end of the day make her feel like she’s making a difference, and so on, what harm in it? Better than going home and downing a bottle of whiskey, as some people in stressful jobs have been known to do, right? All those likes are just a needed and necessary hit of dopamine to get her, and others in her generation, through the bad days.
Viewed in that light, it’s harmless enough, true. But I have not actually argued that the video is harmful, to this point. What I would argue is that the west in general is going through a cultural period where the self is centered in every conversation and every event, to the extent that people now feel that they require praise and recognition for doing the most basic normal human things in the most basic and normal fashion. We’re all attention seekers now. It’s presumably why somebody, at some point, invented the absurd phrase “lived experience”. It’s not enough, these days, to simply understand that something took place and was bad: We must instead hear everybody’s personal “lived experience” of it. This translates into political discourse, too: Politicians cannot talk about issues affecting any group unless they pledge to have listened to “lived experiences”, which, of course, trump basic things like statistics and observable policy outcomes. It’s a subjective world now, not an objective one.
Anyway, we’re off track a little bit here. Maybe I’m totally wrong and this is just a nice, uplifting video. If you think so, you can always tell me in our hot new comments section, open below.