For myself, I have always been a "car nut", and basically started working on my cars as a neccessity, I like beating on my old 57 Fords pretty hard, so when the 3 speed transmission would break (on a fairly regular basis!), or I would break the spider gears in the rear end, I could not afford to pay somebody else to fix my broken down crap. And when I started drag racing in the mid 70s, I broke more stuff. In my late teens I was working at a lumber mill, that my father worked in for his entire working career , but I hated it, so when a racing buddy, who was a service manager at a big Firestone Tire and Auto center offered me a job changing tires, I took it. Eventually got into brakes, suspension, tune ups etc, later worked at a high volume engine rebuilding shop for 5 years, then another buddy was a service writer at a dealership for a new Korean car line, called Hyundai, so I took his offer to work there as a line mechanic in 1986. Got my government auto mechanic certification in the 90s, and then left Hyundai, and went to a Toyota dealership in 1996, and stayed there until I retired in 2020. My disenchantment as a mechanic likely started in the last few years at Hyundai, sales were dropping, the work in the shop got less and less, so what had been a pretty good income dropped substantially before the dealership closed its doors, which is when I went to Toyota. Things were pretty good there for years, until several different management "teams" came and left, and started cutting hours for the gravy retail jobs, followed by a shift from 5 8 hour days, to 4 10 hour days, and now having to work on saturdays. Then Toyota decided the techs were doing much of the warranty too fast, so they started to constantly cutting back on many of the warranty and recall jobs, which meant that we were having to work harder for less money. Some of the times allowed for certain repairs under warranty were ridiculously low, so some jobs were money losers, which led to friction between the suits at head office, the dealership management team, and the techs themselves, as it seems every shop has the favorites who get fed the cream, and the rest got fed the crappy jobs. Often never got paid for diagnosis time, or given extra time due to prior damage, rusty /broken bolts, previous mickey mouse "repairs" by other people, modifications that mase access more difficult , etc (Sorry, a water pump pays x amount, we dont care if somebody added a supercharger, air compressor, skid plates, and jacked up their truck 6 inches, no extra time). As one gets older, your tolerance for BS diminishes, especially when the work slows down during "slow seasons", and being on flat rate, you are standing around waiting for jobs, NOT getting paid for being there unless you are actually clocked onto a job. Then add in the constantly changing technology that you are expected to invest YOUR time into learning, your body getting worn out from all the lifting, bending over, standing on a concrete floor all day, burns, cuts, blisters etc, it just was not fun anymore. It got to the point where you dreaded going to work every day. Plus, living 20 miles from work, meant commuting in bumper to bumper "rush hour " traffic every day, just made me say enough. Dont get me wrong, it provided us with a pretty good living, and all that, but in the last 6 or 8 years that I was working, the shitty days outnumbered the good days.