Book: Our Watch

From the time I was four years old, I could smell it.

The gap between what people said and what they actually felt. The performance underneath the answers. The quiet desperation that everyone around me was carrying and nobody was talking about. I was the kid who kept bringing it up anyway — the boy who was always talking about things you're not supposed to talk about. I was not celebrated for this. I was an annoyance. Too much. Too curious. Too unwilling to let the surface be the whole story.

What I didn't understand then was that I was marinating in it. We all were.

Our WATCH: The Profession of Life is what came from a lifetime of sitting with that observation. Not a self-help book. Not a program or a system. Something closer to a conversation that most of us have been quietly waiting for someone to start — about why so many people carry that persistent, low-grade sense that life is not going the way it was supposed to. About why the quiet desperation Thoreau named in 1854 is, if anything, louder today. About what was missing. And about what it looks like when it's finally present.

You were never broken. You were undertrained. For the most important profession there is.

This book is for anyone who always sensed there was more available than what was being lived — and was right.

Jerry Farrell practiced dentistry for forty-six years in Johnson City, New York. Our WATCH is his first book.