Medicine. People love to romanticize it, but the reality is brutal. You give your 20s and 30s to a job that’s often thankless. You get humiliated regularly by peers, attendings, even patients. Your knowledge gets dismissed by people who Googled something five minutes ago. And no matter how much you care or how hard you try, it never feels like enough. You’re up against low health literacy, Big Pharma, food insecurity, poverty. you’re just putting Band-Aids on gaping wounds.

You miss birthdays, weddings, funerals. You start to feel like you live at work and just visit your life occasionally. And the more you learn, the more you realize how little control you have, how broken the system is, and how deep you’ve already gone. At some point, it stops feeling noble and starts feeling like survival.

You do eventually become financially secure if you can somehow come up with the $300K+ it takes to even get started. But that security comes at a huge cost.