July 2019.

I’m in my dental surgery, staring at my patient in stunned silence.

He stares back. Time has ground to a halt. He just said something that hit me like a truck.

That day, like most days, I was stressed and running late. When my patient slowly hobbled into the room, I smiled through gritted teeth. He was 33 but looked older. He moved like he was made of cardboard, his face a constant grimace of pain.

I helped him climb onto the dental chair. He had lost the function of the right side of his body.

“Must be a stroke”, I thought to myself.

But it was something much closer to home.

I took his medical history. He told me he had a rare neurological tumour that was diagnosed too late. He had surgery, but the damage was done.

My heart went out to him.

When I was 16, I was diagnosed with a tumour too. Thankfully, the doctor found it by accident. He noticed a slight shadow on an X-ray for something much less serious. If they hadn’t, I would be permanently disabled by 30 (or worse).

I mentioned it briefly to my patient, hoping to establish a rapport.

“What did you have?” He asked.

“Well, I broke my neck in 4 places somehow as a kid. The disorder probably came from the trauma. It was called an Arnold Chiari Malformation with a Syringomyelia.”

He let out a disbelieving laugh.

“I had the exact same thing.”

We’re both shocked. I had never met someone who had what I had. He said the same. We compared almost identical scars. Afterwards, we looked at each other differently, almost like crippled comrades.

But then the conversation took an uncomfortable turn.

“So, how are you now?” he asked.

Guilt hit me in the pit of my stomach. Here I was trying to be relatable when we were worlds apart.

“Uhh, I’m good. I lost a little sensation in my right arm and I’m always injuring my neck. But I can’t complain.”

He looks quietly at his feet, then whispers:

“My life is ruined. I am in constant pain and my body is shutting down. The reason I am here is because I can’t brush my teeth properly. One side of my mouth is rotting.”

Then he looked up at me and said the 7 words that changed my life:

“You don’t know how lucky you are.”

I opened my mouth to reply. I closed it again. I had nothing to say. I could only look back.

I was staring in the mirror of a reality I narrowly avoided. It was the craziest experience of my life. It only took my doctor to be a little busier, a little more tired, to miss what he found. And I’d be sitting in the dental chair instead.

20 minutes later, my patient left the surgery.

But his words stayed with me for much longer.

Shock therapy

I drove home that night in a daze. That sentence bounced through my mind as I looked back at my life. He was right. I didn’t know how lucky I had it. I was alive and healthy. I had a job, friends, and family.

But I appreciated none of it.

Instead, I was an anxious, stressed mess. I saw everything as a problem. I hated my work and resented the fact that I had picked the wrong career. I made good money, but it never felt like enough. I was constantly trying to change everything about myself because I didn’t like who I was. I was always comparing with people who were more successful, confident, and content—wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

But the only thing actually wrong in my life?

My interpretation.

Because there was a version of Kieran who would kill for these problems.

Yet I never considered his perspective. I was looking up from my pit, desperate to climb out. Without realising that I stood at a beautiful peak, with everything I could ever need.

For the next 6 months, I saw that patient weekly. I had a front row seat to what that diagnosis did to him. What it could’ve done to me.

It was like someone had attached CPR paddles to my brain. I´m not suggesting life was sunshine and rainbows after. But it had jolted my awareness to look at things differently. I realised how much of my life was driven by fear and how harshly I spoke to myself. I began making different choices, becoming a different person. A year later, I quit dentistry to start again as a writer. I’m now living in South America, fumbling through Spanish, writing my first book.

This was the dream I never thought possible. But that was just because I wasn't thinking clearly.

When you choose to be miserable

My mistake was looking at life through the lens of what I lacked. I thought if I could just work harder or be better than, I would finally be content. THEN I could do what I want. But this is a terrible way to do good work.

It might get you going, but f**k, you’re going to hit a horrible ceiling for the rest of your life.

There is an alternative view. And that's the lens of how lucky you are to be here. This doesn’t mean you become lazy or hide from challenges. You still face the world, but you do it from a position of abundance. With a smile on your face. With optimism and enthusiasm.

And look, I hate self-improvement gurus who force-feed you positivity bullshit.

Life is hard and will constantly smack you in the face.

But the only reason you let it hurt is because you choose to. Because you are accepting a story you've never questioned. It is that simple, but it doesn't feel like it. We live in a society where the default script is that we are not enough, that there is something wrong with us. We’re told once we reach a certain point, we’ll finally be happy. We constantly chase, change, and compare because that’s what keeps the machine running.

If you think differently, you think dangerously.

And that’s why it’s so discouraged.

Let me give you an example.

The Ultimate Bullshit Filter

I genuinely believe I am one of the luckiest guys in the world.

But you are too. Stack the dice of history, biology, timing, geography—and somehow you made it. And every day you are given the gift of life. Things could be a thousand times worse. You could drop dead. You could get hit by a car. You could get trapped in a fire.

When I say this in conversation, people tell me off because I’m ‘being negative’. You can see a literal physical revulsion to the idea. That's just our conditioning to be terrified to talk about dying. But burying your head in the sand doesn’t make death disappear.

It only makes it scarier.

Death is a beautiful gift. It is the ultimate bullshit filter. You realise that 99% of what you worry about is pointless. You see that life is more a dance to experience than a problem to solve. And this gives you the breathing room to make choices more aligned with you. To take risks without being so damn serious about the results.

You don’t need to wait until you narrowly brush against death to realise this.

You just need the courage to stop and think.

Let me ask you, Reader:

What would you change if you saw yourself as the luckiest person in the world?

We get one shot on this planet, but we can take many shots within it.

Choose the story that helps you enjoy it most,

Kieran