Don’t get me wrong. I think that actors’ jobs can be stressful at times and that they can get just as tired and frustrated after a long day at work as the rest of us, but it’s still not exactly a hard life. Last weekend’s Sunday Life magazine out of the Sunday Age had two profiles: one on actor Guy Pearce and one on an emergency and trauma doctor.

Guy Pearce talked about working on box office flop The Time Machine and how it was, like, really tough and stuff.

The Time Machine “was tricky. It went on for so long…” says Pearce. One director, Simon Wells, withdrew due to stress. Panned on release, the flick struggled to recoup its $80 million outlay.

[…]

As matters grew messier, Pearce succumbed to stress, what he calls “head noise”. When shooting ended the Aussie headed for home. “The whole thing felt like overload. Around that time, I smoked more marijuana than the entire country put together. I went by myself to Cape Leveque [in the Kimberly] to sort myself out.”

He lugged around 30 books on Buddhism and his guitar. The guitar was soon ditched (”this wasn’t about being creative”) in favour of meditation. “I needed to stabilise myself. To learn to concentrate, to breathe.”

So a film shoot goes bad and Pearce takes half a year off to go bush, smoke pot and “breathe” to get over it. A couple of pages later Dr Rohan Laging talks about a bad day at his office.

“I’ve had a death every week for the past three weeks, which is a bit of a rough run. You go back and try to think about what you could have done differently but,” he ticks off procedures on his fingers, “I did that, I did that, I did that. But I couldn’t have done anything. It’s particularly unpleasant.”

One patient four years ago sticks in Laging’s mind. He was an elderly general practitioner with an inoperable “triple A” — an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta. He was the first to die under Laging’s care.

[…]

When the man died, Laging told nurses he needed 30 minutes off.

Really puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

UPDATE (9/3/08): Chuck has kindly linked to a very relevant video in comments and noted that it probably speaks for all of us.