In the arts, the advice I've heard repeated over and over again is: If you can live without this, do something else. And it's pretty good advice in my experience. The visual arts / media sector at least has such an overabundance of desperate workers that a sane working environment seems impossible to achieve. So if you don't have an inner drive that absolutely forces you to go into a field like that, do something else.
I got the same basic memo when I was a PhD student in science, and I think I would have quit sooner if not for the emotionally coercive aspects of this advice. This advice replaces the rational question of "is this going to get me to the economic future I want for myself?" and puts it into the emotional space of "do I love this enough?". It implies that if you quit, you didn't really love it. It makes it easier for those who benefit from this exploitation to rationalize it when you leave, saying "Well, they must not have been cut out for this anyway." For the young people making these do-I-stay-or-do-I-go decisions, it means that in order to quit they must not only be ready to give up their dream but also signal to their community that they never really loved it anyway.
As an external observer of course it is ridiculous to say someone can't love something and also recognize the disastrous financial implications of pursuing a particular type of career. The turning point for me was recognizing that the "expected value" outcome of the path I was not going to get me anywhere close to a middle class lifestyle.
Sounds like working for early stage startups... There are plenty of good enough engineers willing to work long hours, often with low pay and minimal equity, on the romantic idea of changing the world and the promise of getting rich.
