Couple of points from my perspective as someone who applied 3 times and then ended up repeating first year (so five years of OOS vet school costs).
i don’t have the energy in my soul to go through applying again and again
I had a hard limit of three applications after my first cycle of rejections and one wait list. I had a lot of other things in my life that I wanted like becoming a wife and mom. I wasn't going to have kids during or before vet school, and I personally couldn't delay having kids deep into my 30s.
So continuing to reapply comes down to your *life* priorities. To be honest, I'm a vet 36-48 hours a week. I'm a mom 48 hours a week (as in directly interacting with kiddo) on my 4 days off. I'm a wife a hodgepodge of hours cause we do a lot of stuff together and it obviously overlaps with kiddo time. And then there's me doing the things I love also. Vet med is honestly not a lot of my life now that I'm on the other side.
To that end, I think the concept of visualizing ourselves doing some other kind of work is a limited thought exercise. Kind of like doing an initial work-up. There's so much else in the world, it's impossible to know how we would feel otherwise without some pros/cons lists, exploring other paths, and prioritizing things. My BIL didn't go through college picturing himself working for JCP for 15 years and working his way up in management. But here he is, the manager of a JCP. It pays the bills so that the other hours of the week he's not working, he does what he wants.
So what do you want from life? Don't build your life around your career; build your career around your life. Sometimes that means setting boundaries on careers that may or may not work out. A career is so that you can do what you want outside of work
That's the thing. You don't get a lifetime to pay this off. You get 10-25 years, after which you owe the IRS taxes on whatever is left and forgiven at the end. You'll never pay off 400k as a vet. You'd live under a forgiveness plan with the goal of saving for 100k-ish in taxes while paying smaller student loans for 25 years. So consider you'll be playing a financial long game where the government comes calling eventually.
And also consider that **** goes sideways. I repeated first year, which added around 70k to my total in the end of what I have and will ultimately pay (plus the interest!!!). Consider that Ross has one of the the highest anecdotally reported repeats per cohort, that's concerning (reasons why still pending since no one is required to report their attrition rates). And **** can go sideways after graduation.
In hindsight, there are a lot of careers I didn't know about until after I graduated vet school that I would have been well suited for and wish I had the opportunity to consider. But since I had the tunnel vision of "follow your dreams", I never knew they existed. I would be a really good ultrasound tech making almost what I make now with less than a quarter of the debt.