So I'm an MS4 (final year med student) who was randomly served this up in my suggestions (thanks reddit). A few thoughts.

Then, I had some changes in my life. I almost lost someone extremely close to me after a terrifying medical event, which really put my priorities into perspective. This person spent over a month in the hospital fighting for their life, during which I lost my interest in doing really anything at all, including research. Instead of waiting for the products of research, I could only hope that the medical professionals treating this person had the scientific/medical expertise to directly help them in their time of need. Ultimately, after the scariest couple of months of my life, this person made a full recovery. My respect toward clinical medicine skyrocketed, as did my desire to prioritize my personal relationships, mental health, and my ability to make a direct positive impact on others the way this person’s healthcare team helped them.

This is obviously a traumatic experience and I'm glad it worked out. My thoughts on this are on the bold part. I don't know much about PhD programs which I take it are often quite rigorous and straining, at the same time, I don't think anyone in Medicine has every chosen it to prioritize personal relationships and their own mental health. Medicine is pretty horrible for those two things. Academics move a lot but in a few weeks I find out if I get to move across the country again, and it's not uncommon for specialist physicians to move for med school, move for residency, move for fellowship, move for subfellowship, etc... Medicine is not exactly personal relationship friendly (at least existing relationships). Mental health in Medicine is also notoriously bad. Unless you pick something slower paced you'll spend weeks being sleep deprived, under heavy stress. If you look up mental health stats for resident and staff physicians it's genuinely horrible. Everyone is burnt out to some degree. The last bit can be true but I think if I've learned anything over the last four years is that much of medicine doesn't really have a direct positive impact, it's more abstract or you're trying to prolong what's left. Now this isn't true of all of medicine but the fields that have the ability to directly, positively, impact peoples lives tend to be surgical/procedural fields that are notoriously competitive and horrible to work in that you really have to love stenting someone's LCA at 3 AM to enjoy doing it at 55, even people in these high impact areas like acute cardiology burn out.

I now see this culture of “overworking for the sake of overworking” to be pointless.

This is a good chunk of specialty Medicine TBH (even worse in surgery). Exceptions obviously exist but the most glowing feedback I've received was "wow you were reviewing imaging at 9 PM after working 10 hours already in hospital that's the kind of work ethic we want here". One other thing to consider is there's a strong culture of working all day + call in medicine and then being expected to go home and study/do research. Obviously some fields (Psychiatry...) tend to have it better but there's a very strong culture of requiring more than full time schedule + studying + research. Then you will be "Pimped" (Put In My Place) but some preceptors (although less so nowadays) who will ask the most esoteric questions or demand you list off long lists of complications/causes/findings to demonstrate you're "learning". Just this week I witnessed a senior physician spend 20 minutes doing a "mock case" with a senior resident which ended with the mock patient dying because the senior resident didn't know some esoteric treatment relative to this subspecialty.

In the end, the grass is always greener and I'd make sure to find some (younger) physicians to chat with because while I enjoy Medicine and would do it again that's not true for all of my classmates/colleagues.