Reflections from a Senior Psychiatrist
Long work teaches certain things that cannot be learned quickly and cannot be passed on easily. Years add experience, but time also strips away illusions.
What remains at the end of a career is not wisdom in the grand sense, but a smaller set of hard-earned understandings.
Work matters, but work does not remember. Organizations move on without malice and without gratitude. Systems reward function, not continuity.
Anyone who stays long enough learns that value and recognition rarely travel together for long.
Competence eventually becomes assumed. Reliability becomes invisible. Care taken quietly disappears into the background because nothing went wrong. The absence of failure registers as success, while judgment exercised goes unrecorded.
Experience does not accumulate as authority. Experience accumulates as awareness of consequence.
Institutions respond to problems. Institutions do not respond to steadiness.
Late in a career, fewer people ask how you think. Fewer people argue. Fewer people need explanations. Younger colleagues do not avoid experience out of disrespect; they move quickly because survival demands speed. Long explanations feel inefficient when everything already feels overwhelming.
Distance grows quietly. Conversation thins without conflict. Experience remains intact but increasingly private.
Meaning does not disappear under these conditions. Meaning relocates.
That shift can feel unsettling. The lack of response invites misinterpretation. The mind searches for explanation and sometimes settles on harsh self-judgment. Doubt emerges not about competence, but about whether seriousness ever mattered beyond the individual carrying it.
That conclusion is wrong.
Work done carefully matters even when no one remarks on it.
Judgment exercised consistently shapes outcomes even when systems fail to notice.
Responsibility carried over time leaves marks that records cannot show.
Recognition was never the point, even when recognition felt motivating earlier.
A life of work does not need to be justified. A life of work needs to be honest.
Anyone who stays long enough learns this.
Work will end. Systems will continue. Memory will fade unevenly.
What remains is the standard one held when making decisions without applause and without protection.
No monument is required. No final verdict is needed.
Truth spoken plainly is enough.