A couple of big differences I can think of there. The first is the quality of your peers. I imagine like most people on this site, I excelled at school with lit

A couple of big differences I can think of there. The first is the quality of your peers. I imagine like most people on this site, I excelled at school with literally 0 effort. In my opinion burnout is largely driven by excessive exertion for a task that seems ultimately pointless, often paired with minimal reward for such. In school people of the mindset who end up getting into STEM are generally going to have excelled with near 0 exertion while also reaping the various rewards for such. As the quality of your peers increases so too does the required exertion to rise above. To test this hypothesis I'd expect we'd see much higher rates of young burnout at elite/preparatory schools, which is certainly true. The second is that there aren't really any short term consequences for failure in school. Maybe you get a bad grade but it doesn't really have any immediate impact. In the absolute extreme case, you have to repeat a grade, which isn't a particularly big deal. Once you enter real life, if you don't come up with $x,xxx per month - you're homeless. This shift in consequences radically reshapes people's approach to the game. Imagine playing a video game; now imagine playing that same video game where if you score below average - your home and entire livelihood is put in jeopardy. And you're only playing against other people who are also, at worst, decent at the game. To test that latter hypothesis we could try to determine rates of burnout compared to the independent wealth of individuals. And on that front, I've no idea.