Prince Harry has compared the scrutiny of royal life to the omnipresent cameras in the 1998 movie The Truman Show.
The British royal and his wife Meghan Markle stepped back from royal duties last year and now reside in California with their two-year-old son Archie.
Speaking on actor Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast, Prince Harry said the life of a royal was "a mix between The Truman Show and living in a zoo."
The 36-year-old said: "It's the job right? Grin and bear it. Get on with it. I was in my early 20s and I was thinking I don't want this job, I don't want to be here. I don't want to be doing this.
"Look what it did to my mum. How am I ever going to settle down and have a wife and family, when I know it's going to happen again?"
"I've seen behind the curtain, I've seen the business model and seen how this whole thing works and I don't want to be part of this," he continued.
His perspective shifted after former Suits star Markle encouraged him to go to therapy.
"And then once I started doing therapy it was like the bubble was burst," he explained. "I plucked my head out of the sand and gave it a good shake off and I was like, You're in this position of privilege, stop complaining and stop thinking you want something different - make this different - because you can't get out.
"How are you going to do these things differently, how are you going to make your mum proud and use this platform to really affect change?"
The Duke of Sussex, who is expecting a daughter with his wife, said he wants to "break the cycle" of the "pain and suffering" of his upbringing with his own children.
He said: "There is no blame. I don't think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody, but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically.
"It’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway so we as parents should be doing the most we can to try and say 'you know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you’."
He added: "It’s hard to do but for me it comes down to awareness. I never saw it, I never knew about it, and then suddenly I started to piece it together and go ‘OK, so this is where he went to school, this is what happened, I know this about his life, I also know that is connected to his parents so that means he’s treated me the way he was treated, so how can I change that for my own kids?’
"And here I am, I moved my whole family to the US, that wasn’t the plan but sometimes you’ve got make decisions and put your family first and put your mental health first."
Prince Harry said that his outlook has improved since moving to Los Angeles, explaining: "So living here now I can actually lift my head and I feel different, my shoulders have dropped, so have hers, you can walk around feeling a little bit more free, I can take Archie on the back of my bicycle, I would never have had the chance to do that."
