If I could turn back the clock and was back at school, a job in medicine is probably what I would have picked to study on.
The sad truth is that if you asked the same question of a group of GPs there is a high chance you would get them saying they would choose anything else. The job is very unlike what most people think it is. If it was working like Dr Brown Bear then fine its a doddle, but that isn't the truth. Even Doctors in other specialties often have no real idea of what it is like working as a GP unless they have done an F2 job in it, because undergraduate exposure is so woefully lacking. Even in places where they get some exposure they don't actually see the realities just as students don't see the realities in any speciality as they are learning not working.
Most healthy people on a forum like this don't use primary care on a regular basis and really wont know what we do. Those that do probably appreciate that even if things aren't perfect that without primary care their lives would be significantly tougher. Most of you probably assume that what we do is pat the heads of the 'worried well' all day long and see coughs and colds, interspersed with 'obvious' conditions that need a specialist to sort. The reality is that we are seeing undifferentiated problems that could be anything or nothing all the time that needs careful assessment, as well as the ongoing management of their chronic conditions and multi-morbidity. Some of what we would be doing in primary care routinely would have been secondary or even tertiary hospitals 20-30 years ago. Sure I do see some people that to me feel like a waste of my time and experience, but I'm also aware that for them they have real concerns or fears. My coughs and colds and minor ailments are 99% seen by my nursing team, and only get to me when a) all nursing appointments are used b) the patient wont give any information to our reception triage and demand a GP not a nurse. There is also a huge amount of administrative tasks to be done, whether its reading letters, writing letters, actioning results, requests from patients, dealing with prescriptions and their enquiries. Although anything that can safely be delegated to non clinical staff members will be, it can't all, and it means everything that cant needs to have a decision made on it by a GP. These can be quite complex and important decisions and not a simple black and white decision. The sheer number of important decisions made a day can be quite exhausting at times which is the issue that most of the professions is struggling with. Decision fatigue is real. 12 hour shifts are increasingly common and probably now towards the norm rather than exception as extended hours and extended access systems have become the norm and funding changes has meant practices essentially have to offer these or see their incomes drop hugely. This has massively changed since I qualified as a GP nearly 15 years ago. I used to be able to always run to time, have a good lunch break and be going home by 6 at the latest when I first qualified. I remember having the time to go and have a nice walk over my lunchbreak even on a regular basis. Now I'm 11-12 hours a day and often doing tasks at home via logging in with VPN services.
I know I'm well paid. I don't dispute that, although I don't think I'm overpaid either. If there were a magical huge number of new GPs and the funding to put them into surgeries that means I could see less patients and do less admin and get home earlier then I would be all for that. There aren't. The government know this. They have tried hard over the last few years and simply cant recruit enough to even maintain current numbers, let alone increase them, so the workload continues to increase, which is why the professions is increasingly stating this as an issue. They have now essentially given up on that plan and it's all about finding other allied health professionals to put into surgeries to see if they can see increasing numbers of patients for us instead. It might help to some degree, but it isn't going to be a magic bullet. One of the strengths that a GP has over all others health professionals is enough of an understanding of everything that when they come and see me with their knee and then mention something else which pricks my ears up. I have to do something about it, and I can. If they book with their knee to see a physio they will get their knee sorted and quite possibly even better than by myself, but the physio wont be asked about the other thing so they either need an appointment to see me for that, or if they did ask the physio they probably wouldn't have had their ears pricked by certain symptoms and it may be missed entirely.
I know its hard to ever win an argument about the value of your own work, and especially when you are well paid, but if you think that it's a simple job that anyone can do, and essentially money for old rope then the reality is very far from that.