[quantumite]

Honestly, you sound burned out. I wouldn't make any career- or life-altering decisions until after some rest. There is a reason you picked the program to begin with and while medicine may be a good alternative, you will likely feel the same way if you get burned out in that industry as well.

Rest well friend!

[rwanda]

This is very good advice and I feel like you've gotten at the heart of the issue. The way you frame it makes it obvious to me that what you're saying is very true, and is not something I've thought about as explicitly as you stated. Thank you!

[dang]

Since that seems to be resonating for you, I think you owe it to yourself to at least test the hypothesis before deciding not to do your original plan. I'm just repeating here what quantumite already said, but I wanted to comment from personal experience. I dropped out of mathematics when, around the time my first kid was born, I suddenly started to feel like my brain was paralyzed and unable to think mathematically anymore. I remember blankly staring at textbook pages for hours, unable to do any exercises at all. I didn't talk to anyone about it at the time, just concluded that I had lost all my ability, and suffered in silence.

Only years later did it occur to me that it might have simply been burnout, and with the right kind of coaching I might have been able to continue. So that's the other bit I'd suggest, besides just taking a rest: find some people who can advise you about this and who you have a good connection with personally. Don't just go through it on your own. Something that may not be obvious to you at all might be the first thing to occur to a more experienced person with your best interests at heart, and it might turn out to be a big deal. You don't need to deprive yourself of help.

[xtracto]

Medicine is crazy hard... way harder than ML/CS I think. Particularly emotionally hard.

Regarding a PhD, I am a Mexican who was "just ok" in a no-name Mexican college where I studied my BSc Computer Science.

I got a scholarship for the UK to do PhD in CS on a 'red brick' university. It was amazing and life changing. So you being on eastern europe surely can easily get somewhere good as well.

Dont give up your dream! Specially when your dream is so fucking profitable. (If you told me it was arts or something similar I would have doubts).

[cpp_frog]

Yes, burnout is something very real. Especially regarding disciplines so close to academia, as is the case of math. Even some of the most prominent mathematicians of the 20th century (e.g. Jean-Pierre Serre, Stephen Smale) thought of giving up at some point or had a bad streak. I wouldn't in good faith recommend that someone leaves the field, based on pre-asymptotic performance (what you see on the short term).

[slindsey]

I was going to post a top-level comment but I wanted to make sure to point out that the parent is the most important point; You are burned out and need some rest and perspective.

That said, consider that with a career in medicine, you could get into research aspects, learn some machine-learning on your own, and apply that to your medical research. I believe it would be much harder to go in the other direction.