I loved school K-12 and I loved college. Then I went to medical school & was miserable. A thoroughly demoralizing and dehumanizing experience. Thought about quitting several times, but stuck with it (didn’t know what else I could do). Internship was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, though at least I got paid.
That made for 5 years of misery. Residency in my chosen specialty was a bit better, though still a grind. After that things got much better & I lived happily ever after, more-or-less . So in my experience, a few years of misery are worth it if the payoff is good enough. Besides, you don’t really know what misery is until after you’ve gone through & come out the other side.
Take heart in a Woody Allen quote from Annie Hall (1977):
“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable.”