Anyone broken free from professional life? Warning: rant

As a teacher I would suggest spending a few weeks in a school to see what it’s like. We have a lot of people start but the workload puts them off.

I'm not a teacher but married to one for the last 20+ years. I would concur with the above.

There are great things about teaching which keeps the committed ones in it, but it's hard work. State schools are run efficiently, on tight budgets. Contact time is maximised, and then colleagues may have to cover when someone is off sick or whatever, meaning that admin, lesson planning, marking etc are largely done in the teacher's own time (i e. evenings, weekends and holidays).

Kids can be great but they can also be twats
Parents can be twats
Management can be twats (obvs this one is not restricted to teaching!)

There are certainly good things about it; a real sense of purpose and contributing to society. Holidays are good compared to most work but as above, a fair chunk ends up being taken up with school work of one kind or another. And when you do go away, you always have to pay the school holiday tax!

My dad went into teaching design and technology after working in the building trade for 20 years, he worked in fairly rough Birmingham secondary schools , nearly finished him off, he’s back in the building trade now and much happier

The system chews people up and spits them out, fine if your young with the energy for it , and if you can get into a decent school where the majority of the kids don’t have behavioural issues that makes a huge difference

My partner went from academia and teaching at a university to doing a PGCE. He now teaches at a sixth form college and loves it. I think @ChasnotRobert covered everything - looooong days, lots of out of hours work, big classes, twatty managers. Extremely crap pay. All worth it because the kids are brilliant, apparently.

I started in the mining industry, then academia, then teaching Design & Technology - called CDT at the time, and the name change accurately indicates the shift in emphasis.

The first ten years were great - I enjoyed what I did, and so did (most of) my pupils.

The next ten years were a downhill slide, largely due to DfE 'initiatives' and OFSTED demands related to unrealistic targets.

The last five years seemed like hell, and everything suffered, including all aspects of my health. Having the all the main exam boards wholly owned by various publishing houses screwed the curriculum to the point where coding was deemed a wholly acceptable alternative to D&T, and most of the things I thought valuable were rejected as irrelevant.

Obsessive testing marking and feedback, inadequate management, demanding and sometimes vindictive parents (not all, but they are the ones I remember most) and 12 hour days rising to 15 around this time of year proved too much, so I retired before it ruined me.

TL;DR it's a young person's game, and it can be much worse than banal admin and management. YMMV.