I absolutely hate being a doctor
I'm a 36 year old GP, UK trained but I made the jump to Australia when the Tories won that election when we were all striking due to shit pay and I thought fuck it. Well, I replaced the shit pay with extremely good pay, and for a while that convinced me that maybe I do actually like this job, but since COVID the cost of living in Australia has been climbing so high that money really isn't the opium for the masses for me anymore and I am once again confronted with that feeling I've had deep down since about the 4th year of medical school:
I HATE being a doctor.
I remember looking around at all the other doctors, from F1s right up to Consultants, from the moment I started clinicals and thought um.. wait a minute... isn't everyone here kinda.. miserable?
45 year old consultants missing their kids growing up because they spent so much time on call, telling me "it'll be worth it in the end, don't worry, it's only shit at [insert whatever level you happen to be at], then it gets better!" meanwhile they are 9 times out of 10 living proof that that doesn't seem to be the case?
At the same time I feel incredibly guilty admitting this. I know there must be many doctors out there, in Aus and in the UK, who love their jobs, and thank god for them/you. If it wasn't for those people, there wouldn't be a health service, very likely one day my life will be in those hands, but I guess the job is just so fundamentally unenjoyable to me that I can hardly even fathom how people do and I am constantly questioning whether my reasons are valid or I am just a big whining millennial.
There's just something about the grinding nature of it. There is no progression really, yes you learn through experience and that makes you a better doctor (unless of course those experiences conflict with a guideline in which case they are irrelevant of course), but nothing you personally implement today will impact your next week, we're still ultimately robots on an assembly line and each day should be the absolute same as the last and your only imperative is to increase efficiency without any increase in the rate of errors otherwise it's off the scrap heap with you. Creativity is absolutely not a part of the job, by definition, I find myself jealously imaging the lives of people with creative jobs where they can see something go from an idea to a reality and reap rewards from that according to how smart the idea and how hard they worked on implementing it.
I just don't know what to do anymore. My golden cage is now a bronze one but the rest of the economy is such a mess that even a bronze cage is hard to leave right now. I know that I am making myself genuinely miserable by doing something I hate day in day out but it's so hard to break out. I know I'm not alone in feeling this way, but I don't know what to do, I don't know many success stories for people who feel like me?