I (23M, American) feel completely paralyzed from a career perspective because I have no idea what the hell to do. If I choose the wrong degree program, I have to pay back all the debt with nothing to show for it. Even if I get a job, there’s no telling how long that will last. Everything keeps changing so fucking fast and it seems like any field I could go to college for could cease to be viable by the time I finish. On top of that, I have chronic health conditions to worry about that limit what I can even do.
(Edit: Basically I have POTS and a neck injury, so it’s hard to do physical labor and I suffer from dizziness, brain fog, and fatigue from being up for an hour or so. I don’t know my exact limits yet, since the severity of my condition varies by day and there appear to be ways to partially recover from the fatigue without having to lay down.)
I think stuff like urban planning and designing walkable environments would be cool, but I’m not sure if that’s a viable path in 2027 and beyond. I also used to be interested in programming, but ever since AI and mass layoffs hit the scene, I’ve become disillusioned and stopped pursuing that path.
I used to feel like the world was stable and I could pick a career based on my passion and be fine. But ever since 2020, everything has felt increasingly more uncertain. The world seems to be losing its collective shit and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.
Is staking your sense of stability on your career the wrong way to think about this? Should I be trying to find close friends or some kind of supportive community that could act as a safety net? Or is everyone too hyperindividualist to look out for each other?
I don’t think there is job stability anymore. Society fucked over everybody except the ultra rich.
There’s so many people transitioning from IT to plumbers and electricians that market will be oversaturated soon enough. I guess there’s becoming a doctor if you can handle 7 years of schooling.
I’m a mechanic of a decade. I can’t throw a rock without hitting a place begging to have me, and have walked out of jobs over petty shit and had better paying jobs before i made it home. If you pick the right trade there is no shortage of demand! And when you can’t walk without tripping into another job, you can ask for a little more than their willing to give too. They don’t wanna pay? Fine, toolboxes have wheels for a reason! Not the best paying career but if nothing, it’s stable and reliable. Oh and my maintinence cost on my and the wife’s vehicles is next to zero between shop discount on parts and free labor (me). Pretty much any other trade is better than being a mechanic, my buddy in HVAC makes more than me and doesn’t work near as hard but he had to wait to find a place taking apprentices.
You don’t. We live in a fucked up society and nothing about this situation will changed until society changes at a fundamental level.
We’re fucked mate.
Join the union building trades my dude. Wake up early, make six figures, and get paid to be trained. We dont go into debt for education. We go into debt buying boats and shit.
Trades are fine but IMO if you have to use a union to make your income then the people at the top of the field are too much of an asshat to know that what they do is broken and causing people to need unions.
I mean, that’s always been the case, in almost every company ever. There are some rare business owners out there that truly take incredible care of their people without a union demanding it, but organized labor and collective bargaining are what brought an end to child labor in the US and Europe. It’s where we got weekends and mandatory safety practices. We’ve always had to fight back to demand humane conditions.
I’m not saying unions are bad and we should not have them I’m saying we should not need unions in the first place so we should seek out where they aren’t needed.
Also side note, I’m surprised how many people are downvoting my posts in this thread lol can people not read the subtext?
You’re catching downvotes because what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. Non-union workplaces are usually more fucked up, that’s not a sign that “unions aren’t needed.”
Mhm, I’m saying find the lens that aren’t.
Still doesn’t make sense, my guy.
Woops thats an autocorrect mistake lol “lens” is supposed to be" ones"
I mean, your reply comes off a little, well, unwise? Like you’re maybe making assumptions on a subject you don’t know much about. I’m not trying to be mean, just guessing at why you’re getting beat up on the votes.
You should in fact seek out unions, because union membership makes unions stronger, and union presence increases working conditions and wages for not just union members but for non union workers as well. It’s documented and confirmed.
A lot of the union contractors I’ve worked for have worked with our trade unions for generations, and some of the higher ups in those companies came from the union ranks and still mostly keep their loyalties. It’s not all roses, but usually when companies get used to playing by our rules, they end up doing okay at it and some are downright pleasant.
This is probably less the case when you’re hearing about sectors that are traditionally non union (gaming studios, Starbucks, whatever) where Union organizing is a new thing and those companies are kicking and screaming and plotting to stop it.
Seek out unions where unions are happening is different from seeking out unions where they aren’t yet established and where they aren’t at all are places where they seem to be functionally well without extra governance and so likely more people worth helping out because they have things going in non destructive ways from the start.
Sure whatever
the people at the top of the field are too much of an asshat to know that what they do is broken and causing people to need unions
Isn’t that the case with almost every field?
Unless the people at the top have an incentive to keep the field healthy, they’re not going to bother to do it. That’s why regulations, regulatory boards, and unions are helpful
That is the perverse incentive of capitalism yes.
Not every field is prone to this perverse incentive and it depends on a per company level how bad it is at any given place, we can choose to get paid well and not need unions easily enough so I’d avoid supporting a company with the work I do for them if something got so bad that it needed a major regulating body to sprout up.
Maybe this is just me being privledged or something but I’ve never seen instances where a union was just automatically better and I’ve actually heard a handful of accounts where it was mostly wasteful so it seek very much like your mileage will vary.
I come from a nordic country with very high level of union membership. Pretty much every time it’s a benefit to be a part of a union just because of collective bargaining. It’s also very important for when there’s a dispute and you need a lawyer, the unions can have a salaried lawyer that has experience with your contract because it’s the same one as for all the other people.
Unions also sometime provide heavily discounted vacation homes and bunch of other nice things.
Oh yeah definitely wasnt thinking about Nordic countries.
Its my understanding that Nordic countries are basically moving capitalism along the slowest by burdening everyone in many ways but more evenly compared to somewhere like in the us so it makes sense to me that in countries like that people could benefit more from unions because they have more direct things for unions to deal with but in the us all the businesses operate much more variably so it really depends on what place in particular is in question and it could even be a matter of location of the same business having wildly different problems or lack of problems.
Funny, you actually think businesses are less varied in the nordics. Capitalism is also just not slow, nordics at the top of billionaires per capita lists, income and other money metrics. Only difference is we’re not swimming in poor people like the US.
Says they aren’t less varied
describes how they are less varied
go find a really boring unglamorous job.
it will be stable.
the problem is people don’tw ant stable jobs that are boring. they want glamorous jobs with high salaries and from big name companies… and wonder why they can’t get those, but they won’t work for a small business because they ‘don’t pay enough’.
For small businesses, pay is only part of the issue. Small business owners often get put on a pedestal in the States as the cornerstone of the economy, but they’re often petty tyrants who subject you to their whims for the most trivial things. At my previous corporate job, my process to take things of was:
- Check my PTO balance has enough to cover what I’m asking for.
- Put in a request in the system for the days off and wait for a decision on my request.
Once it was approved, it was locked in, and quite difficult for my bosses to wiggle out of if they realize they needed more people present than anticipated for the time I would be away.
In contrast, my current job at a small business:
- Tell the owner’s son (my direct superior) that I’m thinking about going somewhere in the future and wanted to make sure I could take the days off.
- Wait a bit, then get told it’s okay.
- Put my name on the shop calendar and indicate I will be away those days.
- Wait several months until the week prior to my departure.
- Owner will come by and say “Hey, I saw you have a week off. You really can’t work that week? I was thinking of going down the shore this week and getting away from the shop (which he’s done a few times already within the last couple of months), are you sure you can’t come in?”
- Spend the rest of the day annoyed until his son comes in and reminds him they already discussed it and gave me approval and I have now spent significant money on travel, accomodations, etc.
- The day before I leave, get another lecture from the owner about how "I’m not trying to keep you from going places, but you really need to give us a heads up first, rather than just booking stuff and telling us after the fact.’
- Spend the first day of my vacation pissed off because I already did exactly what I was told off for not doing.
It’s the same song and dance if I need a doctor’s appointment or anything. I’ve also only gotten a $3/hr raise over 2.5 years there, since “We’re a small business, we can’t afford to give raises,” while the owner has acquired several new vehicles, gone on international vacations, bought and sold a boat, and generally thrown his money around on everything and anything but retaining his employees.
Small businesses can be decent jobs when run by the right people, but they’re miserable when the thinks the universe revolves around them, and anyone else is a secondary consideration, at best. You also lose several workers protections if your small business employer is small enough to be exempt from meeting basic requirements, like my current job doesn’t even have 10 employees, counting the owner and his son, so now FMLA protections for us if we fall seriously ill.
Climbing the corporate ladder and grinding 24/7 is a fool’s errand, but I’ve certainly found more stability in a corporate environment than most small businesses I’ve worked for, with superior working conditions and pay, provided you’re happy with doing a less prominent role. LIke, nah, I definitely don’t want to be plant manager at my previous job, but I would go back in a minute if Document Control offered me a job in batch reviewing. Set schedule, decent pay, minimal OT, solid benefits, and nice, boring work of reviewing paperwork for mistakes certainly isn’t glamorous, but it’ll do you fine and I’d take it over a small business position any day of the week.
I wouldn’t mind being a garbage truck driver, but I do mind being forced to pee in a bottle to make a quota
pee in the trash
I’ve spent most of my life working for & in small businesses, and stability has never been part of the deal lmao
cool. i’ve had nothing but stability and stellar benefits.
but when i mention this people always say the paycheck isn’t enough and tell me how much more i could be making if i was working for a corporation.
As a 22M I think we’re fucked
If it makes you feel better, in Sweden, the average age of students is 25. Why? A lot of them do what they want and figure things out first before deciding. A lot travel, work, or save money before going to college. It’s the norm for them.
Meanwhile for the rest of the world, we’re pressured to figure things out as soon as we leave high school. Looking back, it’s mainly because we are pressured by our parents to go to college. It became a status symbol and bragging rights for them if their kids went to college.
You don’t. You get a new job every two years.
Despite what the Boomers have told you, “stability” is a thing of the past. Your best opportunity for growth and regular raises is to constantly switch jobs until you’ve contributed enough to your 401K to retire. And if you don’t have a 401K, get one ASAP. Don’t wait until your late 30s like I did or you’ll be working until you drop dead. Take advantage of that employer match ASAP. It’s basically free money on the table. (And if your employer doesn’t offer a 401K with a match, well that’s yet another reason to switch jobs.)
Also, I know this won’t make you feel better, but you really do need to make sure that you’re both happy with your choice of major, and able to make money from it. Otherwise you will struggle even more than the rest of us. I fucked around and dropped out because I didn’t know what I wanted for a career, and I’m still paying for it. I will never know what it feels like to own a new car or anything nice. (FWIW I’d likely be in the same situation even if I did graduate, because I unfortunately picked STEM as my major and anyone who has gone down that path can tell you how useless of a degree it is.)
It fucking sucks that life is this way, but that’s the reality we live in. When I was your age it took me about a decade to come to terms with the fact that the American dream only existed for two generations in America (Boomers and Gen X); everybody else gets to suffer. You’ll eventually come to terms with it as well. Or you’ll get mad enough at the billionaires that killed the American Dream and start a revolution.
I agree whole heartedly with the savings for retirement and taking advantage of matching. But I do disagree that you need to find something that you enjoy doing for your career.
I went down that path and found that the enjoyment really fades when you have to do it every day for someone else.
Personal, anecdotal history aside, Ive told a half dozen employers ‘I dont work to support you, I work to support my family. So long as the pay keeps rolling in, ill keep showing up.’ I went to school for tech and got a production job in forestry. Opened a side business repairing computers for everyone in town. Eventually, it got to the point when I was dreading the phone calls and walk ins. I love tinkering and playing with tech, upgrading, tweaking, getting my home server set up.
Doing it every day for people who dont listen? No thanks.
Find an income, and then do what you enjoy with the money you earn.
Regardless, every path is different, and you have to own yours. Whatever choices you make, take responsibility and move forward.
To elaborate, by “happy with your major” I meant more like “willing to work in your chosen industry for the rest of your life” than “enjoy your work”.
I agree with you 100%. One of the reasons why I dropped out is because I saw myself living a future hating one of my favorite hobbies… In fact it already happened. I’ve done some tech support on the side here and there over the decades; eventually I stopped fixing computers because I got tired of hearing people say to me, “something different broke and you were the last one to touch the PC so it’s all your fault”. Not to mention the frustration of dealing with a computer that just won’t work. This is the same reason I’ll never be a mechanic despite loving cars.
Hell, my current gaming rig died after I replaced the CMOS battery and I just do not want to deal with the hassle of trying to figure out why it won’t POST anymore. So I bought a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter and my $4000 gaming rig just sits in the corner of my office partially disassembled because I just cannot be bothered. My phone is my desktop now.
Anyway sorry for the ADHD-induced tangent. Point I’m making is that you provided some solid advice and I hope OP reads it.
Meditation.
There was never any stability in the world, but in times such as these it becomes painfully apparent.
The only place of stability is within.
That ironically also leads to the highest stability without.
I chose my career on a combination of a set of desires combined with wanting a decent paycheck. It worked out well for me.
I guess the best thing that you can do is target something and give yourself options if your primary goal doesn’t work out. For instance, you seem to have a desire in urban site planning, which is something that a degree in civil engineering can help you get. You may be able to get into the field you want, or you can pivot to someone else in the industry. It is also common to use the degree in adjacent fields or even as a way to show you can deal with numbers without being scared.
You can’t. Neither can any middle-aged person, nor old person.
If you figure it out let me know, I’m a recent grad who focused on tech and I can’t get a job
Honestly? Take a small business accounting class and bone up on the tax code (which is more common sense than people think - I do my own taxes and have for decades… it’s pretty easy once you work it out) that relates to it and become a CPA.
THAT one will always be needed because people that run businesses often have the lousiest head when it comes to the numbers.
Done right, you won’t be in any situation that demands too much physicality so if your not as mobile as you’d want, you can stil work.
That and doing peoples passports. A dude at the mall was doing peoples passports filing and photos in like 15 minutes charging each person a couple hundred because it was quicker than trying to schedule an appointment at the post office that’s usually a few months wait
That’s the neat part…
Im sorry but I honestly don’t know what to recommend. I can say I changed my career when it did not work out in my late 20’s and that lasted awhile but now im unemployed in my 50’s and can’t really do that. I can’t move in with family and retrain and such. The one thing I can say is I have gotten more things out of academia than just jobs. I am very glad I was in a LAS program and took an elementary logic class. LAS gets a lot of flack and admitadely its not great at a large school with crazy large classrooms but having a good breadth of education outside of your field is valuable. That being said you mention your 23 which would suggest your passed that point. If not I would recommend doing as much cheap education like community college and searching as much as you can for scholarships to avoid the debt trap.
Yes staking your stability on your career is the wrong idea, I went through all of the stuff you are talking about too, I got the memo a little sooner because i was interested in graphic design and technology as careers since as long as I could make sense of the internet and so I’ve had a lot of time since 2020 to think about all of this.
The truth is, the world is complex but money is not, and money makes the world go round in this capitalist society. So your goal is to find what you can do that enables you to keep doing what you can do. I’m starting a business that allows me to do this so thst I can allow myself to do something different that also enables me more, it can be enabling either in resource collection or in money making basically, capital.
I used to be against businesses until I realized that the point of businesses is always to enable the community at every scale in every niche, so people being business owners is not synonymous with people being manipulative, its just that the same percentage of business people that are manipulative are the same amount of people who are not business owners that are manipulative, so it just seems like there’s a lot because they have more influence basically.
I also went through a battery of interviews recently at different places for different things I’m good at before considering businesses and realized that most people are not going to know what someone who can do work for them looks like even if it hit them on the head, so evidently I have excellent ability to figure these things out even if it seems only baseline competant in my eyes.
Businesses are easier than you think, really don’t need much to start out, I know of a forum called fastlane forum from mj demarco that has plenty of people testing ideas and talking about what worked and what didn’t, some people start out with just a few thousand and basically just keep spamming that until they ended up with six figures after a few years.
And non profits I recently figured out do not require you to be a charity, it just has to be for public benefit. The only real difference besides some paperwork is that you don’t get to sell assets in the end on top of what you pay yourself, which is ideally how a business should work anyways since you shouldn’t be taking margin of the profits for yourself selfishly and instead be putting it back into the business so that it makes more money more faster for more people.
So don’t be afraid to start doing something normal like refurbishing electronics but instead as a non profit where you will be able to take advantages of different accessibility to the same market of people along with better tax and networking advantages.
With thinking in terms of stable enabling, it becomes not about the money and about finding a way to live your life in a way that allows you to fall upwards.
