This is spot-on. People take certain prejudices to their modelling high school dropouts. These are formed by the sheer repetition of observation. Dropping out is something Bad Students do. It's low status. Even an average student who drops out will have the story of their life coloured in terms of: 'he could have done _even_ better if he had stayed in school.'

So to get social approval for dropping out, you have to be exceptional. Such that their predictions of your future outside of mainstream education are so positive, that the 'low status drop out story' can't be made to stick to you. The balance of probabilities isn't enough to get social approval for your actions, the argument has to be overwhelming.

It's unfair, in a way, that there isn't a cultural idiom to support people who, for good reasons, don't want to learn through the high school track, but who aren't amazing individuals.

But in another sense, dropping out to learn faster is in itself to state that you are exceptional--that you have a iron-clad self-belief in your capacity for self-motivated learning. You shouldn't expect anyone to believe this about you; it's a trait that habitually we assign to people after they've been successful, not before. It's natural for people to model others as falling near the median, until they've demonstrated otherwise.

I''m less productive with fewer obligations. Most people are the same. You need to be _certain_ that you are naturally inclined towards setting useful goals and then following through. (I've wanted to write a novel for the past five years. All I have to show is a thin pile of abandoned drafts and margin-doodles.)

Soft skills matter. And removing one huge social component of your life without another to fill it has been, for me, a disaster. If you are 'neuro-typical', but still believe you will be more productive by removing 'wasted' social interaction from your life, you are wrong. If you are miserable, you can't sustain productivity. (And, not least, you might go crazy.) Even anti-social might sometimes be better than non-social.

This is HN, so I share a lot of beliefs about how lousy a state high school education can be. But culturally, we're not geared up as a society to support dropping out as a genuinely equal tract to education and employment. Be careful.