It hasn't jade me. I'm just still very confused why one would go into a career, that's literally a life commitment, if they knew before hand they were going to be miserable everyday of their life. It seems like a waste of a life time. We only live once. Don't spend it hating your job.
What I am trying to get across here, and I guess I haven't quite managed it yet, is that there is a difference between not liking your
job and not liking your
life. Odds are, if you have any kind of a reasonable income, you're not going to like your job. Some jobs might be slightly more tolerable than others, of course, but the vast majority of jobs with good incomes are not pleasant to do. There is, however, a lot of life that you live outside of the office. I think your best bet for a happy life is to plan to get your satisfaction in life when you're not in the hospital. Whether you find it in your family, in love, in faith, in community, in service, in nature or wherever else there is satifaction to be found out there. If you look to your job for meaning, though, I think you will be disappointed.
I think medicine is actually a pretty good career for living a happy life, if you approach it with the right perspective. Medical training is almost univerally miserable, but if you train hard you can have short and flexible hours, a excellent salary (might change, but hasn't changed yet), amazing job security, and very little supervision beginning in your early 30s. Also the job itself, once you're done with the training, is by no means more mind numbing or miserable than other professions. There's nothing unique about the fact that most doctors don't look forward to going to work, except for that fact that they for some reason thought they would.
I think the source of a lot of the misery in medicine is that so many people think that, if they work just a little harder and ask for a little less, medicine will start loving them back. Rather than seeing medicine as a means to an end, and focusing on improving their salaries, hours, and working conditions, they try to focus on medicine as an end unto itself and they work themselves half to death for ever fewer rewards. People do that in other professions to, of course, but Medicine seems to attract more than its fair share of Patty Hursts. I think it would be healthiest for as many premeds as possible to adopt a more realistic attitude about what medicine can and can't offer them.
So my advice is this: don't expect more or less from medicine than you would from a job in engineering, accounting, or construction. Don't make decisions that only make sense in the context of amazing job satisfaction, because your satisfaction is not going to come from your job. Are you a middle aged professional with a good income looking to switch careers so that you can do something 'meaningful'? There is no more meaning here than in your last job. Wouldn't it be worth it to gun through medical school and land a sweet General Surgery Residency? There is nothing sweet about working 100 hour weeks in an abusive enviornment, definitely nothing worth studying on Saturday nights for through all of your 20s. Is this profession still worth it if they pay for Obamacare by cutting our pay and increasing our hours? F- no. On the other hand if what you want is job security, a good income, and good hours after you turn 30, and if you're willing to frontload a lot of misery in exchange, I think medicine can be a very satisfying career. Also our salaries haven't been sacrificed to Obamacare quite yet. If we can just stop offering them to big government on a platter I think there's a good chance they never will be.
