I just danced with an accountant the other night who graduated college a few years ago and has since worked sixty plus hours a week.
My father is a tradesman who works a reasonable forty hours, monday through friday. When the economy was well, his coworkers sometimes put in sixty to seventy hours a week and finished the year earning more than most physician generalists. Of course, the physical nature of the trade has left my father and others susceptible to back injuries and some jobs have required them to work in the wintery outdoors or in a filthy hole.
Now, I work retail. In order to make any sort of a career out of retail, you have to put in at least fifty percent more hours than you get paid for. You'll have to manage a crew of very young and very old people earning approximately minimum wage (turnover is very, very high). You also feel tremendous pressure to outperform stores in your district and to meet the absurd performance demands of your corporate office while adhering to the absurd corporate guidelines for running your store. Your superiors call you up at night or in the morning to yell at you, your associates show up late or don't show up at all and yell at you, and one out of one hundred customers will yell at you, and yell at you for something that either you cannot control or that you can control and control for a very good reason that seems to escape the irate customer. And for whatever reason, the majority of your colleagues will be dishonest and every time you make a mistake, someone will threaten to fire you.
Then, there was the time I worked in fast food. Man, there was so much drama there, I was convinced that if I didn't get the fries into the little cardboard thing in under thrity seconds, someone would die. I confess that I enjoy working under pressure, but it seemed silly when an associate burnt his hand on the fri-o-lator and then slipped and fell on his face in an effort to beat the drivethru buzzer. You'd think with all of that urgency and elbow grease he was trying to save someone's life.
The most chill job I ever had was actually in a hospital. The worst things that ever happened were if you were attacked or if you had to stop somebody from attacking somebody else including themself; but that wasn't every day. For the most part, the job taught me how to work with and in some rare instances "help" very sick people, while keeping myself happy. If I was JUST a little bit older when I had that job, I would have been able to go out with my colleagues every night after work. The downside was that the pay sucked.
I think you can find some things to complain about with every job. Why should medicine be any different? Medicine is sort of a trade involving some physical risk, you work with the seldom satisfied public, there is often a sense of urgency, there is ample competition, and the hours are damned long. Without going into capitation salaries and malpractice suits we already have enough to contemplate and biyatch about! But hey, the alternatives to medicine ALL involve hard work with at least a tiny degree of physical risk (telemarketers get backpain from sitting so long), there will be nasty people (the high school groundskeeper has to deal with little punks vandalizing campus), there will be a sense of urgency (the guy at the mall food court giving out free samples of general tso's chicken will lose his job if he doesn't bring in customers), there will be competition (hundreds of people actually audition to wear the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney World), and the hours will be damned long... provided you want any quality of life.
I guess life is just hard no matter how you slice it... so, when somebody rags on me for pursuing medicine cuz it's "demanding" or I won't get to "enjoy my money," or because there's too much beurocracy and a lack of autonomy, I simply explain that I am going into what I feel I am best suited for and what I find to be more interesting and rewarding than anything else. And then I ask them if they know of a job that requires no training and provides countless hours of satisfaction, a salary and benefits you can live off of, and about as much stress as you would expect from receiving a nice back massage. The best anybody has been able to come up with was gigolo, followed by person married to rich person; neither of those fulfill my intellectual curiosity, so I'm sticking to medicine.
