Ferris Bueller and the Meaning of a Day Off
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller
Not long after the start of my Gynecologic Oncology fellowship, one of my attendings (Robert L. Giuntoli, II) discovered that I had never watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. At some point I had seen, most likely on the Internet, the scene in which the teacher calls Bueller’s name over and over, to crickets. I had enough knowledge to claim familiarity, the way the immigrant child within me claimed—with varying degrees of veracity—familiarity with many parts of American culture I have never truly inhabited. But in the operating room, I was honest. In return, my co-fellow and I were assigned the film as required viewing, either separately or together. (Dimitrios, at least, was Greek and could claim the benefit of the doubt rather than growing up under a rock.) Ever the people pleaser, I took it one step further and offered to not only watch the film but write a book report—a handwritten one, better yet.
Dimitrios never finished the film. I watched it twice: once for exegesis and once for pleasure.
As I sat down, pen and paper in hand, to write my book report, it occurred to me that I had scarcely a concept of what such a report entailed. A thesis? A five paragraph essay? I could hardly remember the last time I had written one. So, in the spirit of the film, I asked myself, What would Ferris do? I opened ChatGPT and typed, “write a book report on ferris bueller’s day off.” I received a composition with sections entitled Summary, Main Characters, Themes, Personal Opinion, and Conclusion. As I skimmed the report, I noted under “Personal Opinion” this sentence: “I rate this film a 9/10.” Once I recovered from the shock of ChatGPT’s use of the first person, I thought, Well, why not a ten?
I put the browser window aside and went off to do other things. When I returned, I accidentally refreshed the tab and was met with a blank slate. Ask anything. I typed my question again. This time, a similar yet not entirely identical report was generated, but with no rating. I did it once more, on my phone, which generated a third book report. Perhaps it sensed my criticism. In any case, I never saw the rating again.
On my first viewing, the rule follower in me kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, only to realize it never would. Ferris offers to take the blame for wrecking Cameron’s father’s Ferrari but gets off in the end. After all, “Ferris can do anything,” Cameron says. Having never been held accountable, Ferris himself proclaims, “You can never go too far.” Between the tedium of school and work and looming adulthood, it appears for about ninety minutes that Ferris is the only person truly alive.
The cynic in me would offer a different reading. Perhaps we enjoy the movie because it is just that, a moving image, a fantasy. But in the end, the miles on the odometer never come off. The dream collapses. Ferris, perplexed that we’re still here, tell us to go home. The screen goes back. Perhaps we’re still here because we don’t want to leave. We’re afraid to look into the mirror and find Mr. Rooney staring back.
I opted for a period of seven weeks between the last day of fellowship and the first day of my attending job. Gen Z might call this a micro-retirement, my summer of rest and relaxation. I have passed the time traveling, moving to Brooklyn, and doing my best to idle. Unsurprisingly, idling suits me poorly, having been conditioned for nearly all my life to do anything but.
I read several books during my unemployment, but the best thing I read was an essay, by Harvey Lederman, titled “Chat GPT and the Meaning of Life.” Lederman, a philosopher, posits that artificial intelligence portends the end of human discovery. Soon enough, all our questions will the answered, the gaps in our neural networks filled in noto sans. He calls this the “post-instrumental world,” in which “people are comparatively useless and the bots meet all our important needs, there would be no needed work for us to do, no suffering to eliminate, no diseases to cure.”
Lederman’s argument reminds me of the sentiments expressed during the Industrial Revolution, that machines would put humans out of work. (ChatGPT, regrettably, failed to locate the source document that I had read in high school which told me all this.) People wondered then, as Lederman does now, what they would do with all their leisure. Evidently, it never came to pass. Nowadays, we are as busy as ever. There is no shortage of suffering to eliminate and plenty of diseases, once cured, now making their resurgence.
Working as a health care professional certainly alleviates my existential fears. Having set myself on a well-worn path over a decade ago like a marble on the run, I managed to duck some of the quarter-life crises faced by my generation. My work remains meaningful to me, and I am continuously grateful to both feel this way and get to do it. I would love, for the greater good, to be out of work someday but it seems unlikely to happen before my career is over. I think increasingly of the promise of job security that drove my own parents into Medicine. Humans, my father once told me, will always get sick. But how I wish it weren’t so.
Contemplating, as Lederman does, not having anything to do gave me such profound anxiety that I stopped after half a second. That, I suppose, is why he is the philosopher and not I. Surgery suits me. There is something delightfully tangible about solving a problem with one’s hands. Here was the tumor, and now it’s gone. Most patients never get to see their disease or hold it in their hands, but I do. Burning, cutting, and suturing all root me to reality. The knots hold me together; they are evidence that I was here. They keep me from becoming unmoored in our hyper-pixelated world.
Ferris, I imagine, would have no trouble adjusting to the post-instrumental world. But what would a day off mean, if there was nothing to do in the first place? Every day would be a day off. Skipping is only meaningful if there is a cost. I keep thinking about Sloane and Cameron watching Ferris on the parade float. Sloane asks Cameron, “What are you interested in?” to which Cameron replies, “Nothing.” “Me neither!” Sloane says.
I worry that in the age of artificial intelligence, there may be nothing left to interest us. Children of the last two decades have never experienced card catalogues. Libraries are doing away with the Dewey Decimal System. Google AI populates the top hit on a search, safeguarding us from falling into rabbit holes. With the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips, the art of discovery—not only for humanity at large but for oneself at small—will be forgotten.
Like the generations before me, I find it all too easy to lose myself in these unanswerable questions. Or maybe ChatGPT can answer them; who knows? I cannot, despite the exhortation, bring myself to Ask anything. The cursor blinks, and I can feel my knots slipping. One by one, they start to unravel, and I find myself unmoored. I think of the wise words that someone said, while lost at sea. Just keep swimming.