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?
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