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?
It depends on what you actually like to do. For something like computer science, I wouldn’t pursue a higher education. This was my path. CS was the hot thing back then (it might look like it still is sometimes, but it’s not really, it’s a lot more like plumbing now). I ended up with a PhD in CS, which is essentially useless. In CS, the only thing that matters, after understanding the basics, is keeping up with new tech and learning for yourself. No college degree can really prepare you for this. Now, if you want to be a doctor, you wouldn’t be able to skip the degree. That’s why I said it depends.
Personally, for my job, if I went back I wouldn’t pursue a higher education anymore. I was doing perfectly well learning by myself even before high school. If you are able to get into an online community of people with the same interest, you’ll be able to learn a lot more, and build a network of contacts. You’ll skip useless subjects and just build up what matters.
My advice to you is to follow your passion (everything will fail anyway, so that’s how you get motivation to keep going). After you know what you want to do, then decide if you need a course or if you can get a job and learn by yourself in order to progress. Unless the job you’re seeking requires some kind of credential, like medicine or law, then you can progress much faster by doing. It won’t look like at first, but you will. If you end up pursuing a higher education, then my advice is to try and go through it as quickly as possible. The goal is to get out quickly. Staying in academia has a terrible cost for the mind. If you lose your mind, you’ll lose everything later.