"Maybe artists just feel more overall."

There's a lot of truth to that statement. The archetypal tortured artist as well as the lovestruck poet both point to the idea that creative expression comes from a heightened sensitivity to emotion. So I'd say musicians (and creative types of all sorts, even in technical fields) have wider swings of happiness and despair than the average person.

I can't remember the artist who said something like, "When you're in that initial stage of creativity, you feel like your idea is the greatest thing the world has ever known." It may have even been Van Gogh who said that... and he ended up shooting himself in a corn field. So there you go.

My personal experience on both sides of the spectrum, a musician as well as an engineer, has shown me that music has shown me glimpses of joy beyond anything I've ever known, and yet it is so capricious that after the high it can (and often does) send me crashing into depths of unbearable misery. When I'm wearing my engineer's cap, life is more even tempered. Not awesome but not agonizing either.

But I think a lot of that comes from one's ability to share one's talents with the world. In a technical field, your productivity is immediately recognizable, quantifiable and dare I say profitable. But if you're a musician, artist, inventor, then your ideas are wholly inside your head until you can "prove" to the outside world that they are worthy. This often leads to frustration as well as disconnection from the world which fails to see what you see.

Of course if you have gobs of adoring fans and bloated bank accounts, you've got no problem.

Same goes for a technical occupation, except usually a decent salary and an occasional "good job" from a manager will suffice in place of bras & panties being thrown on stage. So again, the recurring theme is that it's all the same except musicians and unconventional professions carry greater extremes.