I've followed a similar path as you. I was a late-bloomer, academically. Just sorta bounced around until my mid-twenties when I got bored/depressed (or did I si

I've followed a similar path as you. I was a late-bloomer, academically. Just sorta bounced around until my mid-twenties when I got bored/depressed (or did I simply realize I would be miserable later in life?) with what I was doing in my minimum-wage jobs. I somehow got interested in Physics, put myself back into school, at which point I became incredibly interested in Software Development during an internship my Junior year and the rest is a standard Tech Industry story. I work really long hours, not because I feel some need to satisfy my corporate overlords or because I have too much to do, but simply because I find it fun. I'm sure most everyone here can relate, but that feeling of banging your head against a wall for (x-amount of time) and then suddenly nailing a solution is exhilarating. I don't think that I can hit burnout with that, but maybe I'm wrong. I see two things with this: 1) I (and this cannot be stressed enough) got _really_ lucky having an inherent interest in something that also aligned with a market need. 2) In the course of "bouncing around" in my late-teens and early-twenties I had a lot of time to ruminate (consciously or not) on who I was and what I wanted with life. This isn't some profound thing I'll say and I've certainly seen it echoed here before, but pushing young people (let's be real... they're kids) to make an extremely costly decision that will impact the entirety of their life without knowing who they even are is...crazy. Like you, I'll contrast that with my wife: High School -> SATs -> college application process -> enter a curriculum for (insert here) -> graduate -> get a job (not even in your mid-twenties yet). Maybe some people do know who they are at an early age, but I'd wager most people don't really know themselves until ~25. And now, here you are, coming to terms with yourself after having invested god-knows-how-much money and four years into something you'll likely evolve out of, but still needing to put in the hours to make ends meet and climb the ladder (we all want to be middle management, right?). The key to loving your job in the age of burnout is to not take your job until you know who you are. And even then your interests may not even align with an economic need. So what do you do? Especially when you need to feed yourself and, potentially, your family. It seems to me that finding a career that you like and that feels like fun, rather than work, is a total crap shoot. Sort of like a romantic relationship. Ideally, you want a partner that grows with you, but as we all know that's hard to predict because people change at varying rates or not at all. TL;DR: If you're (really really) lucky and happen to fall into a career path that grows with you, you might not experience burnout