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?
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. 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.
I know my parents didn’t think the world was stable when the Korean war and then Vietnam were going on plus Cold War, acid rain, ozone depletion and women had very few rights. Blacks couldn’t vote in the USA so that caused spillover problems in Canada. When I was your age it was a recession, gas had been horrendously expensive, interest rates were high teens or 20s, recent university grads were going on to second degrees because there was no work to be had - although post secondary debt wasn’t as high as now because you literally couldn’t borrow that much money unless your parents were rich and could afford to pay it.
What I’m saying is that very rarely does anyone in your age group feel like the world is going their way. Figure what you able to do, a combination of your talents and your likes, and figure out the cheapest way to learn how to do it if it means post secondary education or trades or your own time. Most people cannot find something they LOVE to do that will also pay the bills. Or even if you do love it, making it pay the bills is a good way to eventually hate it. In regards to bills, what life do you, not your parents/friends, want to live? Your needs might be less or more than anothers. One person can have a great life on $50K and another “needs” $200K. Where do you need to live? Many people get stuck on staying where they grew up but if you look to previous generations, many had to move to get to where their job and their life aligned. There are probably many, many jobs that you have never heard of and therefore haven’t considered. Career counselling can help.We don’t.
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.
100% the Tech sector is saturated and people were discouarged from doing hands on jobs for a long time. Ive never seen an unemployed pipe fitter (Plumber) unless they drink too much. Same with electricians, mechanics and millwrights. Most of the trades you just have to decide how far you are willing to go for work. Do you want to travel, fly in/out, camp, or stay in one community. After you get that sorted out it is gravy.
Look to labor statistics to see general trends, but also know there are outliers for every stat. Old intuitions say work closer to where the money comes (issuance) from for stability; banks, governments, financial sector, etc. Next best is selling to people/organizations who have money when others don’t. If you’re in a country without reasonable, universal healthcare working for the healthcare industry can afford cheaper coverage or better adherence to equality requirements if you or a dependent are prone to frequent illness. Use whatever talents and interests you can, but most people keep their passions for hobbies and choose a career based on capabilities, opportunity, and what kinds of stress they can manage.
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.
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
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?
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
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"
- Be quick to adapt and learn. Whatever field you enter is going to look completely different in 30 years (if it even remains), so if you can adapt quickly and learn whatever skills are newly relevant, you’ll be in a decent place. In most employers there’s a large barrier to hiring someone new, so if your field is becoming irrelevant / automated / transformed, but you’re able to start doing some of the new work that your employer needs doing, then your role will grow to encompass that work and you’ll remain relevant and valuable to your employer. By adapting and picking these tasks up, you essentially can rotate out of irrelevant skills into relevant ones while keeping your job and seniority.
- I’m not sure how AI affects this, but going with the “adapt and learn” of the previous point, focus more on having a lot of general skills rather than getting really investing in a few specific ones. Most jobs aren’t going to be pure <field>. In my career so far (I’m about a decade older than you for what it’s worth), I’ve differentiated myself from other statisticians & data scientists by also being strong at software development. My classmates from where I did my master’s are better statisticians than me, but they’re limited in what they can do because while they can develop a great model, they struggle to get it running well in a production environment. That limits their employability. I, on the other hand, had no problem with that and was able to have great success at my previous employer. I was then able to leverage that particular experience / skill combination to get my current job, where my employer was explicitly seeking only people with this combination of skills (and struggles quite a bit to find them!)
- I would suggest focusing on developing skills that are complementary to whatever field you enter.
- It’s hard to say what AI will look several years from now given how fast it’s changing, but so far I’ve noticed that its outputs can be either okay or very awful, and only someone who understands the field of that output can tell which of those outcomes it is. That’s why experienced programmers who use AI for coding are able to get some value (they filter out the awful output), while people who don’t understand coding ship slop. Ditto for other fields. Going with the “be okay at lots of skills” of my previous point, I suspect that this would help you get more out of AI than most people as you could more effectively filter out bad AI output in a variety of areas, which could give you a leg up.
Tl;DR always be learning new skills; focus on quantity over quality.
You can’t. Neither can any middle-aged person, nor old person.
If you find the right workplace all of those “bad industry” stuff may just pass around you without affecting you or your company.
I’m in my mid 40s and I dunno. I thought I had it. Now, my company that promised permanent remote work and confirmed my moving was fine, is trying to kill remote work. I live in very rural Japan and there aren’t many jobs out here. No US/Canada companies seem interested in working with a backend engineer on the other side of the world. I have back problems so there are also limits on what physical work I can do so something like construction is basically not an option. So, with my life more than half over, I might lose everything again. If I do, my life will just go to being completely over.
I sort of know that feeling. Hope things go better for you.
Not sure this is comforting, but I e always gotten by by going where the demand is. I didn’t know anything about the industry my first job was in, but the company was hiring like crazy so I applied. Stayed there for a few years, applied to whatever I could find to get out of there and sit out my non-compete, then kept going from job to job in that industry because there was demand.
A huge amount of it was luck. But it helped that I didn’t try to pick some job or industry then hope I could find work, but rather I looked where there was work and just went there.
Is staking your sense of stability on your career the wrong way to think about this?
Of fuck yeah that’s the worst way. Do what you have to do to get paid, but then find as much meaning as you can elsewhere.
Go into anything that has to do with the renewable energy sector, that’s where jobs are going to be for decades to come
I used to wire up inverters on industrial solar farms out west. We all got laid off when trump got elected and he nixed an Obama era federal funding of renewables. Glad to hear it’s comin back
I’m older but have the same sense you have. I think your best bet is to choose a career to pursue based on the kind of contribution you’d like to make to the world.
Right now, AI is mostly changing the way some jobs are done. Other new tech will probably contribute to more of those kinds of changes. If you choose a career primarily based a skillset you like using, I think there’s a good chance you’ll end up very disappointed later when the way the jobs are done changes. But if you choose based on impact and then develop a range of skills (especially people skills!), you’re more likely to end up OK.
You mentioned that programming and urban development interested you. Urban development seems more directly about making a certain kind of impact, so in your shoes, I’d go that direction. That said, I don’t know why you’re interested in programming, and maybe there’s an impact you want to make in that field too.
I made the mistake of choosing a career based on a skillset. New technology has reduced jobs in my field, but the much larger problem is that I hate the way the jobs are done now. I could probably stay motivated and do the extra shit needed to survive in that career in the longer term if I still felt like it made a positive impact on society, but the field itself doesn’t make the world better. So I made a shift into a new industry, although I’m not expecting stability from this one either, and it’s not one that would make sense for you based on your post.
Hi I’m an American doctor here. I’m going to parrot something my father told me growing up. (I come from a family of doctors). “They will always need doctors”.
I resisted it because I took it for granted but he was right. Being a doctor is among the most stable lifestyles you can find today. I live like I think everyone should be able to live. I can tell my job when I’m not available. People take my opinion seriously(even in non medical matters).
The road to being a doctor is hard as balls and will take a minimum of 7 years (often more) before you can do anything with it but you get to help people, you get to think critically every day, and the life is stable. Tbh I can’t imagine myself doing anything else now. (If you had asked me during training how I felt, I would have told you this was the biggest mistake of my life).
The road to the end is very very long and it is very very stressful. I felt like I was going to die during it several times.
Plumbers and electricians will always be needed too
Except everyone and their mother are trying to become those now. There’s a good chance that that labor market will become oversaturated. 😢
Take it from a nurse, any job that regularly deals with literal human shit will never be over saturated.
And people will pay anything for help when their toilet is backing up and overflowing at 2 am
EMS has been over saturated for like forever and that’s one of the shittiest jobs in existence
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any job that regularly deals with literal human shit will never be over saturated.
-MurseJoy
Long list of people that want to do a cool job (EMS) = lower pay and over saturated.
-MurseJoy
Well there you go. Disproved your own thesis lol
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I got like 4 friends trying to be drs and it really is a grueling process