I have lived in China and kids there are booked fully. Their parents sacrifice everything for their only child but at the same time they put a very high burden on them booking every space of their lives.
Just letting the kids fool around, experience what interest them, play and make mistakes is inadmissible.
Usually the parents work all day and only grandparents could take care of them, so making them go to some class or another is a way to have their kids busy all day.
Because they have only one child, the child needs to be perfect all the time, and the bet must be risk free.
This creates children than don't really know what they really want, and with zero creativity, incapable of making mistakes or take their own decisions.
Also when they don't have external pressure they just laze, because they lack internal motivation.
This particular person is happy on the work because he is told what to do, I suppose he works at Microsoft. Only when he is free to do whatever he can do he feels uneasy.
Like adult people(over 40) in Russia when Soviet Russia collapsed, they felt uneasy when there was no one taking all the decisions for them.
They just had not the training to deal with freedom.
As a kid, when I finished school, I was free, My friends and I decided what we wanted to do all the time. If I joined a competition, I did not tell my parents.
Over time you make lots of mistakes,exploring new territories, experiences and dangers, but develop autonomy and learn to deal with chaos.
After university I had the opposite problem to this man's, I could not stand people at work telling me what to do, specially when I considered they were taking bad decisions, so I started working on my own.