When I finished school aged 16 (UK) there were kids who went and got well paying jobs at the local factories. The rest of us who stayed in education were well jealous of them - they were living life like proper adults with all the freedom and a good lifestyle, while we felt a bit trapped and stuck. As we got older we were scraping by on bar and care jobs to pay for rooms in a shared house to study etc while those kids who left aged 16 were getting a mortgage on a nice house and thinking about getting married and starting a family.
Except years later having pushed myself through education and up the career ladder as much as I could tolerate before taking the decision to plateau in a job for a bit, my lifestyle is a lot better than what I'd been jealous of, but those kids who had those jobs aged 16 are still doing the same job and looking a bit trapped.
This isn't a story about how to live your life or what the best career is. All of the paths me and my schoolmates took were valid. What I am trying to say that progress through life isn't linear, and we all end up going through these cycles of change-stagnation-change-stagnation at different rates to everyone around us.