Think about where your ideas came from. Almost everything you believe you learned either from your parents or at school, and the school was built during the industrial age to produce a person who shows up at nine and leaves at five, Monday through Friday, and does what the manager says.
People hear that and picture a factory floor, then look at their own office and decide they escaped. You did not escape. Whether it is a factory floor or a fancier factory floor in a business building, you are still factory. You sit in a chair, you produce something for somebody else's company, and the only difference is that what comes off the line is a spreadsheet instead of a shoe.
That shape ran for twenty years. Show up, go home, Monday to Friday, and it continues until you graduate college. It is a kind of very capitalistic, very industrial education, and I am describing it rather than attacking it. Does it make sense to you? It is simply the way we grew up, and nobody in it was being malicious.
Then there is how it measured you. Fail the exam and you are a bad student. Don't fail the exam. Don't miss the exam. Don't fail the homework. Don't fail the project. Every adult you trusted organized your childhood around a single instruction.
Twenty years of being told not to fail. What was that system actually trying to produce?
Not a successful person. An employee. It was never designed to develop successful individuals, because a person who starts things fails constantly and a school has no column for that. It was designed to produce one reliable individual who turns up in front of a manager, follows the order, does the homework. I am not anti-education and I am not telling you to resent your teachers. I am telling you what I have observed it do. The thing it did most efficiently was teach you that failing is painful, which is the least useful belief a person can carry into a job search.