I’m an NHS GP, similar vintage to @Prestissimo. In general, no I don’t enjoy my job. There are aspects of it that I do like, in that I actually generally like talking to people, finding out about their lives, and doing the “detective work” of medicine itself. Like others I do feel I have a vocation for medicine and I feel that my work is meaningful and worthwhile and really makes a difference in people’s lives. I also deeply appreciate after being a junior doctor, that as a GP, I don’t have to work many antisocial hours and always have weekends, nights and bank holidays off unless I decide I want to work in out of hours etc. And can usually get most of my annual leave at a time that suits me. I can also easily choose to work part-time without sinking my career forever, which would not be the case in every niche of medicine.
But unfortunately all of that is very much overshadowed by the sheer relentlessness of it all, the impossible workloads and even more impossible time pressures of having to do the impossible workload in an impossible time. Never EVER leaving work on time (and not because, as when you were a junior doctor, someone is super unwell and in desperate need of your attention, having a heart attack in front of you but because you need to fill in a podiatry referral form for someone’s toenails to be clipped). The fact that your work is never “done”, and is constantly added to.
Throw in a pandemic situation (where it became very clear we are simply cannon fodder and not seen as important to this country’s government), abusive patients, a tsunami of emotional need being thrown at you every day, general GP-bashing from the public, Dr Google (and now Dr ChatGPT as well, even worse!), impossibly long waiting times for secondary care, and every single patient wanting to discuss roughly five million issues in a ten minute slot (which also has to include medicolegally adequate documentation and any referrals etc needed as a result), plus the fact that all of the more straightforward (and quicker) consultations are now filtered out by pharmacists, practice nurses, and other allied staff such as physicians associates, leaving you with only the most horrendously complex or difficult medical issues or indeed just people that are difficult to deal with. Plus losing continuity of care due to this, and with it any meaningful relationship or understanding of the patient as a human being or chance to observe issues over time and possibly piece together connected problems, making the whole thing feel more transactional and less satisfying and ultimately less good clinical care.
Along with no time or opportunity to pee or have something to eat or drink when you need to, let alone exchange any meaningful conversation with colleagues, continuous interruptions from reception and task-switching needed, no proper staff kitchen, horrible depressing staff common room, migraine-inducing fluorescent strip lighting, uncomfortable chairs, buckets all round the place for drips from the ceiling in winter and increasingly furnace-like conditions every summer which get completely ignored by management with no adaptations or adjustments made for the fact that it’s pretty much 40 degrees indoors and hard to think clearly and certainly as quickly as usual. Plus the soul destroying somehow simultaneously deathly boring while also super stressful and meaningless activity that is appraisal and revalidation.
On top of all of that, not being paid anywhere near enough not only for the “actual” as opposed to “theoretical” hours worked, medicolegal risks and the length of specialist training required to do the job properly. With serious real-terms pay erosion of about 1/3 since the global crash in 2008. While physicians associates walk straight into the job from uni without having to pay their dues doing crippling intense 100 hour weeks as junior doctors including night shifts etc. But get paid around 2/3 of my salary, even though they are nowhere near as qualified or experienced and can’t even prescribe. And at the end of the day they are not doctors, let alone fully trained GPs. The fact that I am expected to prescribe for them and supervise their full clinics as well as my own, while they are paid 2/3 of my salary and the costs of living are ever increasing whereas we have basically had a pay freeze since 2008…
The job has completely changed since I first went into medicine. And it all just wears you down and leads to total burnout. Especially if your personal life has been stressful as well and/or you struggle with health issues, particularly mental health issues. Maybe I’d feel differently if I’d had a nice smooth ride in life with a supportive partner etc. Unfortunately I’ve had some really “major adverse life events” happen to me over the years not limited to domestic abuse, divorce, a child custody court case, single parenthood, the sudden unexpected death of a sibling, a close relative dying from COVID. I also have bipolar 1 disorder. Which I did not know at the time I decided to do medicine, or started or indeed finished medical school. In partial answer to OP’s original question, I was prepared for the job to be hard work with long hours and high stress levels, I even anticipated that there might be a pandemic situation before too long as it was “due”, however I would never have chosen to be a doctor if I knew as a teenager that I was someone who had a mental health condition that is quite so vulnerable to stress and sleeplessness. And I definitely DID expect to be more fairly paid for it. I did not go into medicine to become rich at all, money in itself isn’t a huge motivator for me, but I did expect to be more financially comfortable than this especially as I get older; I certainly didn’t expect to be worrying about paying normal bills for the necessities of life.
I loved my job as a junior doctor when I started out in medicine, despite the exhausting 100 hour plus weeks we worked at the time. I don’t know how much of that is because some of the difficult major life events I went through and my poor mental health were yet to hit me, or how much some of it was to do with being fairly junior and feeling “safe” that I could pass things up the chain of seniority if I couldn’t handle a situation etc. It may well also be that back then there was a lot more camaraderie, with “firms” still being a thing (basically teams of doctors who worked together on a regular basis), and things like doctors messes, free car parking, free on-site accommodation, and regular coffee breaks etc. still existing. I’d also say that things generally felt less pressured on an average day back then and we could truly aim for clinical excellence as a team, rather than just firefighting and trying to avoid a major catastrophe while never really being able to address anything properly due to lack of time, staff or resources. And when there was a more intense day due to staff sickness or flu season hitting etc, it was much easier to gear up and see it as a challenge rather than simply another daily exhausting grind. I would also say that I felt reasonably well renumerated for my work then. It all changed around the time of the economic crash in 2008 and Labour losing power in 2010, and I honestly feel we have never recovered as a profession from that time.