We Didn't Plan This started because Faith and Isaac have a lot of feelings about life not going according to plan. This episode is probably the most honest that's looked so far. The topic: optimism bias — that very human tendency to believe we'll be the exception, that this time we can handle it, that the numbers will somehow stay good if we just quietly stop taking the meds. It sounds like a psychology lecture. It isn't. It's two doctors sitting across from each other asking: on a scale of one to ten, how much of a sucker for suffering are you, really?

The conversation takes a few unexpected turns. Isaac talks about the period during med school where he was simultaneously doing weekend relief teaching, one-to-one tutoring, and working as an overnight caregiver through a home care app — wiping floors at strangers' houses at 2am and heading back to hospital the next morning. Faith talks about starting her blog not out of optimism, but almost the opposite: a need to warn people what they were getting into. And then how, slowly, writing about hard things in a hopeful tone actually rewired the way she processed them.

They banter about on-call stress eating (including carbonara for supper in hospital), and the witching hour between 4 and 5am where all bets are off. But the thread running through all of it is the same question: is optimism something that happens to you, or something you choose? And if you could calibrate yours up or down — would you?

⏳Chapters

0:00 – Intro + optimism bias

0:25 – How optimistic are we?

3:19 – Ambition vs optimism vs just needing the money

5:02 – Isaac's med school hustle era

7:57 – What one night of nursing work does to an aspiring doctor

10:00 – Why faith started a blog (it wasn't really about optimism)

18:21 – Writing as a way of rewiring how you feel

21:06 – The things we always underestimate (time, sleep, emotional bandwidth)

25:25 – Becoming a freelance doctor and regaining optimism

26:45 – Does surviving hard things make you more or less hopeful?

27:09 – Pain caves, canoeing sprints, and the resilience mindset

29:59 – On-call coping + 5am carbonara

31:12 – Optimism bias in medicine: when patients go rogue

35:02 – What are we optimistic about right now?

36:59 – Would we calibrate our optimism up or down?