It's as if no one taught them -- or they just don't have the sense for it? -- that a startup is just a vehicle to make money. There's nothing special about it. You can make lots of money without a "startup." You can make lots of money doing many different things even without a business entity. It's just an abstraction for linguistic convenience.
My biggest wakeup was finding people much less educated and much less intellectually gifted and much less socioeconmically privileged making a lot more money than what could be considered their betters in more prestigious and, on the surface, well remunerated professions.
If you don't want to make money, don't go into business. Stay at your job and grind a career out. If you have the desire to make money, your senses will naturally sharpen as you use them more to achieve that end. Otherwise, if you go and "build a startup" for any other reason than making money you will fail barring extraneous circumstances.
Baffling that this isn't common sense, really. But my fault. I keep forgetting a professional forum is just a proverbial water cooler, where you get to see a wide mix of people in your profession -- and all the different backgrounds, values, ideas, and ways of seeing the world -- most of which are continuous works in progress that culminate only at death.