The science of starting over

How your brain processes major life changes—and why that keeps you stuck

We’ve all got that friend. The one who’s decisive as hell in part of his life—but couldn’t choose a salad dressing if that life depended on it.

What’s going on?

Let’s talk about it, because not only is it a fascinating peek under the hoods of our brains, but it also exposes one of the subtle ways our brains keep us stuck in the status quo.

I met Ravi on the ski slopes. It was one of those chance encounters you have with strangers on the lift. We were both surgeons, so, obviously, we started trading war stories.

If you’ve never heard one of these conversations, consider yourself lucky. They almost always become a game of oneupsmanship, each of us telling increasingly shocking war stories, trying to cow the other into submission with the maggots we’ve taken out of people’s noses or the leeches that we’ve pulled off patients and dropped in alcohol so that they’d explode (yes, this really happens).

I’d saved my best for last. This wasn’t my first rodeo. For sure the lady who used her, um, diarrhea to help slide herself out of her hospital bed would be the worst thing either of us heard.

Reader, it was not.

Ravi had me beat with a story so grotesque that every person I’ve told it to since has plugged their ears before it was over.