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The only air conditioned room at my first duty station was a closet they called a server room... No one wanted to do the computer stuff when the cool toys were on the airstrip.
As for advice... Don't be scared, every adult you meet is faking it to some extent and it took me a long time to realize it. Also, be wary of random advice on the internet lol.
I wanted to rock but my dad belittled me until I told him explicitly that "I wanna rock", somehow saying those words made me spin in place and change into an adult glam rocker. The resulting explosion launched my father (a veteran) thru the roof. All my mother would do to help him was spray him with water.
He died from his injuries
I'm almost 50 and still don't know. The best advice I can give is to try lots of things. Very few people just know, and even they didn't know until they tried.
I realized I wanted to be a slave because I was born with no money.
It's a really great life.
If I can ever save more than a few thousand I would love to stop paying half my income in rent and maybe one day own a home. Then I might be able to afford to take a little time off from work
I didn't, I made a career choice early high school to become a lawyer, because it's arguing with logic and is well paid, then I realized that not only is that quite a competitive field with lots of people going to law school, but I am also not a fan of the social part of it, so I pivoted to Software Engineering late high school and went to University for that, I have been doing that ever since, I enjoy it, it pays well.
As for the rest of my life, I have never really had plans, but I was always nihilistic and I also don't want kids, so it's kinda meh, but I have discovered some things I truly love doing, like going to techno parties and such, so I do that.
Then whatever happens will happen.
You don't have to commit to any one thing in this life. I'm doing very little at age 51 that I was doing at age 27.
I also wasn't doing what I truly wanted to do most in life until my 40s.
I fell into it. Needed a job, saw a sign, liked it, now I'm manager.
Same. Started working retail, floated over into the pharmacy since they needed help, and I've been there since.
My mom always said "you don't need to know what you are doing for the rest of your life, just decide what you are doing for the next five years".
Interestingly, this is basically the approach of some of the best management/leadership thinkers these days (e.g. Cynefin). I think the basic premise is "the world is changing so fast that any plans you make now might be meaningless in a decade, so focus on what's knowable in the here and now, and your next step". Dave Snowden from Cynefin points to Ana's "The Next Right Thing" from Frozen 2 as excellent advice 😅
Well, I grew up depressed and with constant thoughts of suicide, so that had a pretty big impact. I was kind of naturally good at schoolwork, but was hamstrung from the fact that I disliked actually doing homework at home (if felt too boring and I would get distracted), and that I constantly stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning, so I was always exhausted. And while I sometimes found the actual learning or schoolwork engaging, I hated the school environment, where it seemed all my teachers found me, at best, to be a kid who was safe to ignore and, at worst, an annoying burden; while my peers would bully me constantly and exclude me from basically all social activities.
Eventually it got to the point where I was actively looking forward to the day when I would kill myself so that I wouldn't have to suffer living anymore. But that day kept seeming far away. Eventually I had a kind of gradual waking up, where I realized that if I wasn't going to kill myself, I had to find a way to make my life worth living - because I couldnt accept living like this for another 70 years.
So I started trying to figure out why I was so miserable, what would make me happy, and how to change my life to achieve those ends.
My nerdiness led me to studying the sciences, which eventually led me to software, where I got a job.
But my loneliness and depression led me to discovering that spending time in nature, exercise, eating healthy food, and having good social interactions made me happier.
When I got my first software job, I realized that the florescent lighting and grey cubicals reminded me of my school environment, and I hated it again. So I found the concept of early retirement. At this point, my experiences in the outdoors and being friends with outdoorsy people served me well - I knew that I could endure and excell in conditions of physical discomfort, and that I could figure things out for myself with enough tinkering.
So I built out my own camper van and lived in it while working as a software developer, saving up a bunch of money and putting it into index funds. When covid hit, I was able to buy 2 houses, and now I rent those out for some passive income.
Once I had all that done, I quit my software job. These days I live off of those passive investments, doing the repairs and property management myself for the most part. And then I supplement that income sometimes with some part time work as a concert rigger. A lot of the time I'm just in my van travelling around, spending time with friends, and rock climbing.
It's hard to give advice to an internet stranger, but here are some of the things I think would have been useful for me to know.
First - learn how to look good. Get a good haircut, wear good clothes that fit, and keep yourself clean and groomed. In all of these things, look for ways to express your values, personality, and lifestyle. First impressions matter a lot, and how you present yourself is your first first impression.
Second - there is a lot to be said for working hard, being smart, never giving up, and committing to the grind. But the two biggest gaps I had were mindset and social skills, which are inextricably linked.
Sometimes you really just have to embrace the suck and grind it out - but things tend to work out much better if you have a positive attitude, are happy with your life and where it is going, like who you are as a person, and expect your life to be full of excellent opportunities. I dont believe that "everything happens for a reason". But I believe that everything that happens can be a valuable lesson - so you can be grateful for the good things that happen to you because they are good, and grateful for the bad things that happen to you because these are the things which help you learn and grow as a person.
And when you have a light-hearted, can-do attitude, you tend to find you are rarely short of friends. Get comfortable meeting new people, push yourself to find the people you really click with, and deepen your relationships with the people you find. Always keep going out and finding new connections, and try to find something positive about every person you meet - even if you might not want to spend a ton more time with them. These people will form your social support network, who can pick you up when life has beat you down. They will imbue you with their own energy and ideas, so you can see how many opportinities you really have. And on a practical level, they will open up professional opportinities for you to advance your career or switch careers. In particular, try to get out and meet people outside your normal peer group age-wise. Older people can often be a wealth of knowledge and opinions gained from a lot more life experience than you have, and younger people tend to have a lot of interesting ideas and energy from not being encumbered by some of life's harsher blows.
Third, take care of yourself. Drink water, eat protein and vegetables, avoid junk food, avoid excess screen time, exercise regularly, sleep well as often as you can, get out into the fresh air and sunshine.
A good question to ask yourself:
What do you love or want?
Just ask yourself this question, and answer honestly. Then ask yourself - "how do I do that?" Then, try something to achive your goal. You can take this exercise as far as you want, planning a whole life for yourself that is truly amazing - but it should be noted that this only works if you actually get started on the work. Sometimes we get paralyzed, thinking that our ideas for how to get from A to B arent good enough, or will obviously fail. But often, just by standing up and getting started, we find new, better ideas coming to us as we work.
If you find that question really difficult, then here is an easier one:
What do you HATE?
This one tends to be easier, because the things we hate tend to be a lot more concrete and easier to bring to mind. Maybe you hate sitting in traffic, or not having a new video game you really want, or sitting under florescent light bulbs. Good! Now ask yourself: how can I avoid these things as much as possible? The answers to these questions often won't lead you to a life you want - but they will often lead you in the right direction.
Stop looking at other people's answers. Every time I ever looked out instead of in for the next big step it ended up being a gigantic mistake that blew up in my face.
the only reason I look out sometimes is because my world is so small and I know there's so much else out there that I don't know about. Plus, I was a sheltered child so asking outwards means I get a variety of perspectives to choose and learn from rather than whatever bs my parents taught me
Good answer. Ironically, pretty much all the answers here are good, and worth looking at (because they are mostly broad, general advice)
You don’t need a job you love, hardly anyone gets to do that. It’s amazing if you can, but a job you can tolerate is really all you need. Keep your eyes open for opportunities, take them if it feels right. Trust your instincts.
Save some money. Having a bit of financial freedom can drastically help you with having flexibility to do different things, and you need to do lots of different things to figure out what you like.
You will have to sacrifice comfort at some point and take some leaps into the unknown when the opportunity presents itself.
Most of all, get out of your hometown. The single biggest influence I’ve seen on people turning out great or people getting stuck in their ways is experiencing different things. College can get you part way there, but travel and living away from your hometown, especially if you can swing something international for a while, can help you immensely.
A job is a place you go where somebody pays you to do something you don't want to do. You then use that money to fuck off and do the things you do want to do.
There are few people in the world who legit like their job.
Even if you go into your passion field, you might love it for a year but soon enough that too will become the "thing you have to do".
Grandfather was a Firefighter. Older sister became an EMT. We watched lots of medical shows growing up. My favorite was a show called: Emergency. It's about the beginning of the Paramedic program in California. (Not the original paramedic program).
I was hooked. I've been in EMS for 38 years. Army Medic '86-'89, EMT '89-'00, Paramedic '00- current. I'm still on the road. Trying to reach 50 years.
The short answer is, whatever you want.
For the longest time I too had no idea, though I knew what I didn’t want to do. I just didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s bullshit.
So i made enough money to have my own place and make my own choices.
For now I recommend you take a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs approach. Secure the Physiological and Safety Needs and the rest will follow.
In order to do P and S in western society you need to make enough money to pay all your own bills.
Just try stuff and see where it takes you. Talk to lots of people from different walks of life too.
A long string of momentary necessities
I'm not sure I know what I want for life but I have a number of things I don't want so I'm trying my best to steer clear of those.
I was changing majors in college like changing clothes... but was the only one in my dorm that had her own computer and dot matrix printer and knew how to fix it. (yes I'm old) Took me way too long to figure out that my hobby was the foundation for a career.
...point being that you might be good at something that has value and you aren't recognizing it.
Go out and do things.
Anything, really, just don’t stay in. Try to do something fun and interesting. You’ll find paths through doing that you can’t get by applying for things.
That's the neat thing: as an adult, you dont have to decide. You have the rest of your life to figure it out.
I didn't. I just ended up here, and eventually landed myself in a position I enjoy and is quite comfortable.
STORY TIME!
I've always been into computery stuff. Started tinkering with FreeBSD in late 90's and later migrated to linux. This became a bit of a hobby, and I hosted a few websites in the early 00's. But I never finished school, so I don't have any formal education. I took a year of private school in a relatively big city, where I got my CCNA, that's all.
Come 2007 and I wanted to move back to the previously mentioned city. I looked around for any job, and I landed what in retrospect is the worst job I've ever had - "truck driver". I don't mind driving trucks. In fact, I quite like it. It's just that 95% of the time was spent loading or unloading. And the cargo in question was copying machines. And you can bet that whoever needed the machines never wanted them on the ground floor. Literally backbreaking work for shit pay. The only hilight of my day was chatting with the guy who set them up. Given my aforementioned hobby, many cups of coffes were drank while talking about postscript and spooler daemons.
Come 2008 and I desperately needed a new job. The hours at my shit job had been reduced to almost nothing, and I couldn't say I missed it anyway. I stumbled across a listing on monster.com titled "Seismic Survey Technician". I had no fucking idea what it was, but I applied anyway as it listed some things that seemed interesting; travel, ships, computery stuff, heavy machinery. So I put my application in just because why not.
A few weeks later I was awoken by the phone at the crack of noon. It was an unknown number. I picked up, and in was the technical manager (Let's call him Bob. He'll be relevant later) of the seismic survey company. Turned out my application was interesting despite my complete and utter lack of formal education. Turned out my upbringing around farm equipment and computer hobby was the kind of combination they were after. He confirmed that I was still interested, and let me know they'd be setting up an interview. I'd receive further instructions via e-mail.
A day or so later I got the e-mail. Time, date, and plane tickets for me to fly down there (different city). The catch: The date conflicted with some army-related plans (I was part time in the army at that time. Think of it kinda like national guard), and while I could get out of it, I had kinda looked forward to it. So I asked the people if they could change the date and rebook the ticket. I expected them to say "no", but I didn't care. It wasn't like I was gonna get the job anyway.
Next day I got a new mail. Updated tickets for a rescheduled interview. OK, cool, there were a bunch of people in that city I hadn't met in ages, so why not. It gave me a few hours of free time, so I might as well go to the interview for the free trip down there. Fuckit, it wasn't as if I was gonna get the job anyway.
The day of the interview arrived. It went OK. Nothing particularly good, nothing particularly bad either. Before leaving I asked as a formality when they would expect to have reached a conclusion. They told me end of the month. I bid them farewell, and went to a bar on the other side of the town where I got way too drunk at such an early hour. Fuckit, it wasn't as if I was gonna get the job anyway.
The month ended. Nothing. The day after I phoned them up, as a formality, just to ask about the status. Well, it turned out that it was just a manner of way more applicants than they expected, so they still needed some more time before deciding. They gave me a new date. Well, fuckit, it wasn't as if I was gonna get the job anyway.
The new date arrived. Nothing. Normal work hours were over, so I concluded that I didn't get the job anyway. I was sitting by my PC that night and suddenly an e-mail ticked in. 21:30. I read through it. I read through it again. It was a job offer, already signed on their behalf, listing starting pay higher than I'd ever dreamed of. The only thing needed for this to become real was for me to print, sign, scan, and send back to them.
I kicked in the door to my flatmate. "Hey, I need to borrow 1000 bucks." When he asked why, I told him straight up "We're going out to celebrate that I won't have to borrow any more money from you. Also, I need to buy a scanner tomorrow."
The job was pretty interesting, and it did involve the combination of heavy machinery and computers (Mostly linux), and it took me to the far corners of the world. However, I decided to leave in 2012: The company wasn't doing that well financially, plus I'd just gotten my first kid. Time to get a "normal" job so I could spend time with my family.
It took me until 2019 to conclude that normal jobs are for normal people. I missed the travel, the freedom, and the substantially higher pay of what I thought was a chapter I'd closed for good. I asked a former coworker of mine what he was doing and whether they were hiring. Well, he was still in the industry, but for a different company (the old one had folded). Turns out they weren't hiring, but he'd forward my details just in case.
A few days passed and I got a phonecall, again at the crack of noon. Turns out it was Bob, and he'd happily hire me again. I spent a few rotations offshore, but as Covid hit, there were drastic changes in the company. This somehow resulted in a promotion for me. I was no longer what we often referred to as a "backdeck monkey" - They needed someone to handle the shoreside support of the production system. That became me.
And to skip a lot of corporate stuff that I can't be arsed typing out, a few colleagues and myself were poached by the competition to support their current survey system as well as design the next gen setup. So that's basically what I do nowadays - Computery stuff. I still joke that I want to drive tower cranes when I grow up. But I'm 42, and I honestly don't think I'm going anywhere - My career has taken me to almost all corners of the world, and I really enjoy it, so I quite like where I ended up.
Did a whole bunch of different things. Stopped doing things I didn't like when I had the security (money, support, etc.) to do so.
I think the best advice I can give is "stay focused, alert, and highly flexible. I certainly did not end up where I thought I was going to go.
I found out that it's more important to be flexible and be able to grab opportunities when they appear than to make the "right" decision.
There's no right answer on how to live your life.
And besides that we live in times that are changing so rapidly that what you might be doing in the next 10 years donesnt even exists right now.
Just keep your brain sharp and your body healthy and you'll be set.
I found this book when I was almost 30 and it changed my life.
"Discover What You Are Best At" by Linda Gail.
It's a series of self tests you can complete in a few hours and a list of the jobs that use those skills.
If you have a job that you don't hate, you've solved a lot of life's problems.
If you have a job that you don't hate, you've solved a lot of life's problems.
I'll second this. There's a reason people are paying you to do it. It won't be fun every day, but not dreading having to go to work EVERY DAY is worth its weight in gold! Except for the whole "being able to spend it on good and services" thing.
I didn’t… I stumbled in to it, by accident, realized I knew what I was doing, found a full time job. It pays the bills now… but man it’s not fun anymore.
To be honest, “what do I do with my life” is not the right question.
What do you want to do as a career, is different. You can have a career / job and still do “other things with your life”.
Separate the two… find something you can tolerate that pays well (as another poster said), then go find things that make you happy when you do them for enjoyment.
When I tried programming (software development) for the first time, I was doing something silly like drawing a football field and its various markings. I got stuck on a part I couldn’t figure out and eventually gave up for the day. I woke up in the middle of the night with the solution and remember the excitement and joy of solving the problem. After that point, I kept doing it and trying to make choices that got me closer to doing it as a career.
I really hated highschool, so avoiding anything remotely like that has been my main guideline.
That's a little too past tense for me, even in my 40s. I originally, as a kid, wanted to be a paleontologist or scientist of some description. That morphed into music education at some point. That went horribly when I realized I hated teaching people who didn't want to be there and were just trying to get an easy credit. So, having played around with programming as a kid (and having parents in IT-related fields), I ended up switching to computer science. I (mostly) enjoy software engineering, but I also bought a farm last year and now have two jobs. Is this permanent? Is this all there is? I'm not sure that I can commit to answering that (even in the best case where retirement is something I might actually be able to do; being a US citizen abroad is full of annoying for investing in the future and Japanese IT salaries are mostly 1/3 or less of the US version except at big FAANG and the like).
I didn't. I was just as lost as you. Things just came about and everything turned out quite fine, so looking back, being lost kind of worked for me. It's helpful not to turn down good opportunities, I guess.
No joke, I read the "tales of IT greentext" and thought it sounded like a pretty sweet field to be in. I started applying to IT jobs and finally someone gave me shot.
through k-12 i wanted to be a pilot because my grandfather flew a plane as a hobby.
in college, i bounced between pilot, music composition, auto mechanics, musical theatre.
dropped out of college and did hairnet & nametag jobs for a while and asked my uncle to get me a gig as an associate PA for movies (but he wouldnt even return my call).
a friend of mine worked for a video game company and said he'd hire me to be on the phones because i just needed work, so i decided to do that for a year or two.....
i worked at that company for 14 years moving from customer service to QA to software engineering. now working as a software engineer for a boring non-game company.
its not necessarily what i want to do, but it pays the bills and i dont mind being bored with it for another 23ish years until i retire.
#adulthood :/
Some people are born with purpose, but for the rest of us, don't be afraid to try different entry level jobs before deciding. Work in retail, food service, trades, factories, sanitation, whatever! I learned a lot on every job I've had, and it helped show me what things I was good at, and what I was really bad at. Some things I thought I would enjoy were torture, and others were better than I expected.
I'm finally somewhere I think I'll be happy for a long time, but it took all the contacts and experience from my other jobs to get me here.
Good luck, and don't forget to have fun!
Don't let yourself become a caricature of yourself, step outside your self expectations and find ways to face your fears. I didn't really know what I wanted to do until my mid 20s. You don't need to plan it all out from the outset, spend some time trying stuff and learning who you are and what you wouldn't mind spending time on getting good at.
Well. First my body made it clear I had to eat and drink. Then it became clear I had to have shelter. Then I realized I just have to do whatever I can get my hands on doing to not die. So that's what I'm doing.
Unless your mommy and daddy have a lot of money, you're not going to have a whole lot of choice in the matter. You're just going to do what you have to.
Don't waste your time on jealousy;
Sometimes you're ahead,
Sometimes you're behind.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.[...]
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life.
The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives,
some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't.
I chose something that I respected other people who do it. I always thought construction guys were super tough and manly, and I always wanted to be that tough manly guy. So that’s what I did, and now I own my own construction company at 35.
My advice is look to people you like and respect. Who do you idolize? Who do you want to be like? What does that person do? Then go do that.
I started with basic goals:
Make enough money that I don't have to worry about money. Not like "annual tropical vacations" kind of money, but "if my car is stolen tomorrow I can buy a new one without having to worry about covering other expenses" money.
Do work that is creative and technical.
Do work that somehow benefits society.
When I got to university I pulled up the list of majors and started highlighting ones that sounded interesting and would likely fit those goals. I ended up going into engineering. And after bouncing around in industry, for a few years, I found a niche that fits me well.