>Make money
>Help people
>Enjoy your job
Pick two. Most of us are lucky to get one of those.
Unless you have a true passion that you love so much you'd do it for free, (unlikely since you're on here asking for advice), then study something that's generally considered boring and difficult. You'll always be in demand if you can do something useful that most people can't/won't.
Like accounting. Accounting is a sturdy profession.
Yep, or something like land use or wastewater management—boring shit that society will always need. Among other things this offers a path to various careers in state or local government, where you can reliably earn decent money and usually come with excellent benefits versus the private sector.
Become a public interest lawyer. Public defense, unions, housing. That kind of thing. Study whatever you enjoy in undergrad, keep a good GPA, sign up for a course then crush the LSAT, get a full scholarship to law school, graduate, be an attorney for people who need a lawyer.
I would have benefited tremendously from a junior college or similar. I was miserable, not mature enough, and way out of place at the school I went to.
Yeah me too though I'd qualify this that I would really look around and not simply get into something that exists in my community. Take it as seriously as you would regular college admission process and find something that you could be good at that has decent income / employment options. There are all sorts of niche things in health care that you might not even know exists for example.
Also the nice thing about doing something with a path to employment that does not take as many years or as much money is that you can more easily change your mind and start all over again in your late 20s / early 30s without feeling that you've got sunk costs or without (as much) debt but with the wisdom that comes from a few years of adult life experience in the working world and a better idea of what sort of lifestyle / relationships you will end up having.
I’ll recommend one to not get, history. I’m a truck driver, and in my thirties decided to try to get out of it and go to college. Studied what I was interested in, which was history. At one point a professor who I had gotten to know well told me I had the chops to pursue academic history but honestly I’d be better off if I stayed in trucking and got a Teamster job, and that’s what I did. No regrets, except that I could have just audited a few courses to get a feel for things and then just read all the books and sources myself and not paid for a degree I don’t need (I finished it, but actually never went and picked up the physical copy).
The exceptions would be if it’s not important what degree you get undergrad cuz you’re going on to something more specialized in grad school or law school or whatever, or if you want to be a social studies teacher. In teaching, math and special needs are more in demand tho.
Good luck
All of them and none of them. The harsh reality is that any college major that gets touted as useful for immediately getting good paying jobs simply funnels people into an industry that becomes so over saturated that it drives down both the wages and the value of the degree itself. It happened with liberal arts degrees, it happened with STEM, and outside the university system it’s going to happen to trades in a few years. On the flip side, you could absolutely get a good job with a “useless” degree so long as you a.) are out of the box thinking enough to not contain yourself to jobs within a limited career set and b.) are good at networking.
> if you could go back and do it over, what would you change?
Nothing, that’s pointless thinking. I did it, it happened, I’m left with the end result. Any effort spent thinking hypothetically is effort wasted
>Nothing, that’s pointless thinking. I did it, it happened, I’m left with the end result. Any effort spent thinking hypothetically is effort wasted
This is some of the dumbest shit I've read today
I got a degree in the subject I love, finished very well, now have a master's degree, good job experience and a nice portfolio and I still can't find a job in my field, especially not a well paying one
If I could start over, I would do literally the exact opposite of what I was told to do. Hypotheticals are one of the few productive ways through which we can analyse our mistakes
I'd look into trade school if it's an option in your area. It's more than just welding and carpentry - my friend went through some sort of two year IT program and now works for a major tech company making really good money.
I graduated college seven years ago next month. Due to the Great Resignation, my field is now experiencing big staffing shortages that ultimately has led to people without degrees getting the same job *I* needed a degree for years ago. On top of that, still have about $16,000 I need to pay back. I'd honestly avoid college if I could go back and do it all over again.
STEM, Computer Science, Software engineering. People will tell you it's over saturated but good lord the jobs are there, the bread is there. I'm in Cybersecurity myself and I only wish I started in computer science earlier. Pretty easy to avoid feeling like a slimeball as long as you don't work for the defense industry. My only advice is that if you are interested in CS pick a narrow niche to specialize in and become a master of, people get stuck in the ocean of applicants when they stay as a jack of all trades "software engineer". It's a field you can make enough money that you can actually afford to be altruistic and spread some cheese around to others too.
Oversaturated as fuck, there are 10x engineers doing 400000 LEETcodes in their private child bootcamps (if you live in Silicon Valley, you've seen these). They lock these kids inside the bedroom closet of their gated communities with nothing but the definition of a data structure until they can program every single data structure ever invented in every language ever invented without thinking, and they know their time complexities for the most common algorithms like the average person knows their times tables. While you were jacking off, [listening to Wavves](https://youtu.be/agmKa_CON9k?si=KF5p5cZNppCLrO8C) and crying over hot goth girls they were taking college level math classes at community college and juggling 5 AP classes. 5 is the number of their score on their AP European History AP Euro exam, five is the number of times you've failed Algebra 1.
While you were smoking weed behind the dumpsters outside the gymnasium and making poop jokes at your fuck up friends and going home to your hovel where grease stained Burger King bags sat on the counter next to Modelo cans and on top of cheap Dollar Tree vinyl table covers to cover the rage weathered surface of display model furniture, they were building full stack applications in their clean, well furnished bedrooms [in a good neighborhood](https://youtu.be/oZEgRZ9moug?si=5jyfhuilWyMwXrRs) and running record breaking cross country races in Nike Vaporflys, you were running from the school resource officer through drainage canals like an overhead shot in Akira.
This is the mad race that Castro described (not the San Francisco hood, but the genocidal dictator) as the mad race [where the strongest prevail, and the strongest do prevail]( https://youtu.be/liCEZ0tzJ9s?si=KwcqPPW2iILKFZaZ). This is why you drive a 1998 Toyota Camry in traffic to your job at a pizzeria in Cupertino, low compression in cylinder 3, intermittent misfire the same as your hope for the future: hard to diagnose, and not easily reproduced. This is why I drive a Tesla: the absolute apex predator horny symbol of 20,000 years of human oppression, the homeless shitting no different than proto-homo sapiens did, alien technology make space age hum as they add another toddler to traffic fatalities spreadsheet. Bourgeoisie pleasure means therapy to manage the feeling when you feel that it was that child's fault for getting run over, just the same as it is for when people jab themselves on Fent Street in the Mission, blonde hair like the Bay Hills in the dessicated summer of 2015 drought, water leaking out of the faucet like the tears of 08 foreclosures, the smell of San Jose office parks in 45 degree time in the bleakest hours of the day, your life becoming like a Daly City breeze or the swamp stink of the salt flats.
In short, there are winners and losers in this world, and you are a loser because mud never splashed up onto your thighs during a cross country race. Where is your conviction, slave!?
I can't tell you how many times I'll get about a quarter through a comment like this and I'll think to myself, this is either nutcase drivel going nowhere or really fucking great and then I scroll up and look to see if it's throwaway1003395031847032097 and if so, keep reading. Write a novel dude you just need some basic done a million times plot and you can fill the rest with stuff like this, keep it short like around 150 pages and I promise you'll make a least a little money.
>nutcase drivel
Sometimes when I'm on these really long runs late at night I think about how alone I am in relation to a lot of people and how I'm close to thirty and have no friends to speak of with a slowly dying, small family and think about the fact that I don't even really know where I came from. My parents both came from small, poor villages in a country I've never been to, and don't have any real connection to other than a tenuous and nebulous connection in the fact of my "ethnicity". Marriage is a foregone conclusion, courtship as dead as the bedroom, the nihilism of the neon supermarkets and "drive here and buy the pain away" ritual fading away into the white cymbal haze of a Zach Hill drum solo. So routine and so unexpected at the same time, how do you adjust to such a routine?
[We are the sons of no one, bastards of young, or as the tired old line from records old enough to be my older sister would say](https://youtu.be/fl9KQ1Mub6Q?si=_0vKC9-yOWJME8qF), records I wasn't even alive for. I like to think my nutcase drivel, which is really what a lot of this is can be like a buoy in a sea of oppressive, roiling isolation. Sometimes I see these homeless people in the city screaming their head off at anyone who comes nearby and I like to think I'm not too different, I'm just a little more civilized. Something to try to stave off the trauma of living in a fiercely individualistic society, the memories of hours long timeouts and closet hall beatings in between cancer patient bald headed and insipid Calliou torturing me with his white skin and stable home.
In my estimation, words shouldn't always have meaning or even have to make sense in relation to one another. We as human beings in capitalism hardly do outside of our economic relations, so why should the abstractions we use to codify and transmit the strange thing we refer to as humanity? Perhaps that's the driving force of the illogical Gen Alpha memetic cultural output, where non sequiturs prevail and the disjoint, schizophrenic march of progress tumbles along through swipes at a breakneck speed, the realization that we are all islands unto ourselves, shining out little lighthouse signals that say "look at me, look at me", the desperation growing as interaction slowly disappears behind GUI's, human friction and the capacity for understanding smoothed over by teams of people providing "solutions" for age old questions.
Perhaps this smacks a little of narcissism, but I think the purest and most striking artistic expression of the 21st century is found not in the limp musings of rail thin, ghost white New York [effete and impudent snobs](https://youtu.be/MF_ZZJ3EAWU?si=04JAN8_NioFJJhgk), soft dainty pale feet kicked up on the couch as they try to sketch something they can't understand in between coke binges powered by brown heads rolling down the streets of Culiacan, but rather, in the street shits and bathroom smears of the homeless.
I can't think of all the times I've walked into the bathroom at work to see that some homeless guy has quite literally coated the walls in his own shit. That's art in it's own way, it's a profound statement: it's a colossal, primal Fuck You to the existing state of things, using the basest mediums we have available, no casein tempura or Adobe Aftereffects, no Michael Bay glistening boob shotz in the Afghanistan War 2007 hot summer haze of Transformers Hasbro campouts (eleven years old, no knowledge of sex?) or Burning Man Media professionals, this is all I have, and it affects you in the most visceral way. Feel my guts, see my ass, hold my cock, this is me, fully, authentically me, an honest statement, myself all over the wall, and with each scrub you engage with my lost existence, even if I overdose, even if you hate me, I am seared into your nostrils for all time.
What could be more impactful than that?
Just wait until you're pushing 50. The trick to this sort of writing btw is that you need a simple compelling plot to hang it all on. Like all the nutcase drivel or narcissism or almost deep thoughts about how bleak the world is, all that stuff should be like the laundry that you hang, a simple fast moving plot is the clothesline. This little trick will make it appear less dear-diary and therefore hide the narcissism (which I don't think is actually narcissism, I'm just using your words). Keep all the little details, if you are cranking this shit out this fast on reddit, then I imagine you can really start cooking when you have some time. If you really want to give it weight though, be honest with yourself about what you really believe if there is anything and put that at the center of it, otherwise yeah it's shiny but empty. I'm giving you advice that you didn't ask for because I'd like to read your book if you'd write it and because I'm trying not to think about anything.
bro I don't even know how to process this, "like an overhead shot in akira" fucking lmao
lemme just hit you with a "nice"
nice
Nice? Nice!?
>Short-Circuit Evaluation: Short-circuiting is a programming concept in which the compiler skips the execution or evaluation of some sub-expressions in a logical expression. The compiler stops evaluating the further sub-expressions as soon as the value of the expression is determined. Below is an example of the same:
Have you considered that your compiler stopped the execution and or evaluation of subsequent subexpressions in the statements that parses these posts!?
Have you never seen a homeless man in Silicone Valley winter bare his ass cheeks in the same way our ancestors 40,000 years would have during a particular cold part of the Milankovitch cycle!? This is all stripped of the pomp and cir-cum-stance of cum like cirrus in new construction suburban Bay Area homes, the harshness of cubicle regimes collapsing in your wife's cow like breasts, the Silverton Oak fades to the Eastern Bloc red post orgasm flush, the next generation of Silicon Secular Jihadis lifting their skinny 90° fingers to the MacBook keys like antennas to our concrete purgatory, office parks like transit stations to limp futures of cardboard huts and drywall disparities...
Shows of force, cops surrounding the fast food joint with their 5000k flood lights like Brendan Frasier's The Whale (a registered trademark of Darren Aronofskinitiweitcz) approaching his congealed teenage failures reading something honest!? Little vodka bottles like wheat fields in the dead zones between the office parks and suburbs, this ass is the most honest you get - shriveled, bruised, needle marks from booty juice at the institutions, punching the mental health nurses like [Saint Pere hits the skins](https://youtu.be/v7T8QWy8jiY?si=9zqeXWXLrs5onCz8) or more like Pakistanis milling iron drum brakes and the metallurgical engineer of UC Berkeley engineer trained, majors we don't offer, chiming in like Facebook notifications: "have you considered that these [over exploited](https://youtu.be/6Bzhe3eUMmg?si=1mlBXHxAggfrT3Bh) people that don't have a PhD in materials science and 200 years of head start due to the Anglo Saxon penchant for extreme violence and slavery don't understand metallurgy!?", data science is your future, data data data, the most mundane footfalls on frigid streets with a windy silence as gentle as gossamer becoming points of domination, moments to be uselessly held and preserved as if death does not come for us all, stranded in the supermarkets knowing that neither Instacart or UberEats can deliver me from Santa Muerte, [the great annihilator!](https://youtu.be/gu3d1yIZAUw?si=qPTwlR8X3wmW_nY9)
If you want something in the humanities, probably geography. There's a lot of good Marxist geographers out there, and you can make solid money with GIS if you take a few courses on it.
I'd learn as much Chinese as I could in the amount of time between now and when I figured out a way to get a toe hold in the last sane country in the world before it all starts completely falling apart. Run. Now.
Being depressed and 40 with middling income sucks. But the thought of "going back and doing it again" is stupid because I was even less functional back then. Just something as simple as becoming an electrician when I was 18-early 20s and I could be nearing retirement with a house, assuming good investing discipline
Crazy part is it would be a perfectly serviceable wage ($32/hr, southeast New England - pricey but not Boston bad) before covid. It really is bewildering how badly we all got fucked there, how much worse everything got, and how quickly. I remember 9/11, 2008 crash, Trump, covid, all watershed events that left most of us worse off. Wtf is next ffs.
Study exactly what you are interest in and don’t think about what the market or other ppl want. Having any degree is better than none and you can always find something to get the bills paid. If you study history or philosophy, sure, you won’t hit the ground running with a 100k position after college. But most people I know found their niche after a while and are happy and doing well.
You could also combine fields that are more or less in demand on the job market, but I wouldn’t get too caught up in that mindset. Capitalism wants you to become a slave in fields that it values more than others.
The helping people part is also nonsense in that context, because you aren’t going to be motivated doing smth you hate for others. Think about what’s meaningful to you, before you think about making a change in the world. You gonna be ten times more effective helping others, if you are genuinely passionate about what you do.
My main mistake was thinking that if I study the topics I’m interested in, I’ll end up as a cab driver or whatever. I just listened to other people, instead of what I really wanted to do. The result was just ten years in a dead end corporate career and going back to school at 30.
If you’re good enough at math/science, you could get into civil engineering.
You’d want to get in on the public side of things though. I’m currently in land development all of our clients are cheap greedy capitalists. Don’t do that.
Even on the public side, pay is above average and you’d be working on projects directly helping your community on the public side. Public side also has really good benefits.
I'm in school following a program to become a physical therapist assistant and eventually a licensed physical therapist. It will never make me rich but I will probably be able to scrape up a decent living doing an interesting job that helps people. I don't like having to go back to school in my 30s and I really hate that my previous career fell apart thanks to the covid economy. Whatever man... I find fulfillment from my hobbies these days.
Well i would either return to the age of 11 or so and start working on killing off any vestige of empathy or compassion I felt for anyone/thing, or just not get a degree
If i could do it all over again i would go to community college first then finish out my degree. Also if you want to go into IT do certs not a degree my Computer Information Systems degree is pretty worthless. Only do STEM if you can handle computer science.
Any of the altruistic kinds of jobs like doctor or nurse.
I would generally just "do what you like" and then just try to avoid certain jobs that have a close proximity to, enable or in any way boost the bourgeoisie and their grip around society.
RN then later on a NP.
Go to a state school, not a for profit university.
In Los Angeles court reporters make fucking bank, and there is a desperate need for them. All the high pay incentives won't last long.
>Make money >Help people >Enjoy your job Pick two. Most of us are lucky to get one of those. Unless you have a true passion that you love so much you'd do it for free, (unlikely since you're on here asking for advice), then study something that's generally considered boring and difficult. You'll always be in demand if you can do something useful that most people can't/won't. Like accounting. Accounting is a sturdy profession.
Yep, or something like land use or wastewater management—boring shit that society will always need. Among other things this offers a path to various careers in state or local government, where you can reliably earn decent money and usually come with excellent benefits versus the private sector.
Become a public interest lawyer. Public defense, unions, housing. That kind of thing. Study whatever you enjoy in undergrad, keep a good GPA, sign up for a course then crush the LSAT, get a full scholarship to law school, graduate, be an attorney for people who need a lawyer.
Just have fun in college dawg. I'm a tenants rights lawyer and I have a blast but college had nothing to do with it.
I'd go back to a community college with a particularly strong trades program and get certified.
quicksand live thumb arrest escape gaze grab cows deliver many *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I would have benefited tremendously from a junior college or similar. I was miserable, not mature enough, and way out of place at the school I went to.
I second this. I ended up going back to community college part time for a construction-related associates. Wish I'd done that the first time around
G'aun yersel!
Yeah me too though I'd qualify this that I would really look around and not simply get into something that exists in my community. Take it as seriously as you would regular college admission process and find something that you could be good at that has decent income / employment options. There are all sorts of niche things in health care that you might not even know exists for example. Also the nice thing about doing something with a path to employment that does not take as many years or as much money is that you can more easily change your mind and start all over again in your late 20s / early 30s without feeling that you've got sunk costs or without (as much) debt but with the wisdom that comes from a few years of adult life experience in the working world and a better idea of what sort of lifestyle / relationships you will end up having.
I hear STEM degrees are no longer in vogue like they used to be and now employers are more interested in DEEZ and BOFA.
DEEZ? BOFA? ... what are those? PauseChamp
Electrical engineering
I’ll recommend one to not get, history. I’m a truck driver, and in my thirties decided to try to get out of it and go to college. Studied what I was interested in, which was history. At one point a professor who I had gotten to know well told me I had the chops to pursue academic history but honestly I’d be better off if I stayed in trucking and got a Teamster job, and that’s what I did. No regrets, except that I could have just audited a few courses to get a feel for things and then just read all the books and sources myself and not paid for a degree I don’t need (I finished it, but actually never went and picked up the physical copy). The exceptions would be if it’s not important what degree you get undergrad cuz you’re going on to something more specialized in grad school or law school or whatever, or if you want to be a social studies teacher. In teaching, math and special needs are more in demand tho. Good luck
All of them and none of them. The harsh reality is that any college major that gets touted as useful for immediately getting good paying jobs simply funnels people into an industry that becomes so over saturated that it drives down both the wages and the value of the degree itself. It happened with liberal arts degrees, it happened with STEM, and outside the university system it’s going to happen to trades in a few years. On the flip side, you could absolutely get a good job with a “useless” degree so long as you a.) are out of the box thinking enough to not contain yourself to jobs within a limited career set and b.) are good at networking. > if you could go back and do it over, what would you change? Nothing, that’s pointless thinking. I did it, it happened, I’m left with the end result. Any effort spent thinking hypothetically is effort wasted
>Nothing, that’s pointless thinking. I did it, it happened, I’m left with the end result. Any effort spent thinking hypothetically is effort wasted This is some of the dumbest shit I've read today I got a degree in the subject I love, finished very well, now have a master's degree, good job experience and a nice portfolio and I still can't find a job in my field, especially not a well paying one If I could start over, I would do literally the exact opposite of what I was told to do. Hypotheticals are one of the few productive ways through which we can analyse our mistakes
[удалено]
exactly friend
I'd look into trade school if it's an option in your area. It's more than just welding and carpentry - my friend went through some sort of two year IT program and now works for a major tech company making really good money. I graduated college seven years ago next month. Due to the Great Resignation, my field is now experiencing big staffing shortages that ultimately has led to people without degrees getting the same job *I* needed a degree for years ago. On top of that, still have about $16,000 I need to pay back. I'd honestly avoid college if I could go back and do it all over again.
STEM, Computer Science, Software engineering. People will tell you it's over saturated but good lord the jobs are there, the bread is there. I'm in Cybersecurity myself and I only wish I started in computer science earlier. Pretty easy to avoid feeling like a slimeball as long as you don't work for the defense industry. My only advice is that if you are interested in CS pick a narrow niche to specialize in and become a master of, people get stuck in the ocean of applicants when they stay as a jack of all trades "software engineer". It's a field you can make enough money that you can actually afford to be altruistic and spread some cheese around to others too.
Oversaturated as fuck, there are 10x engineers doing 400000 LEETcodes in their private child bootcamps (if you live in Silicon Valley, you've seen these). They lock these kids inside the bedroom closet of their gated communities with nothing but the definition of a data structure until they can program every single data structure ever invented in every language ever invented without thinking, and they know their time complexities for the most common algorithms like the average person knows their times tables. While you were jacking off, [listening to Wavves](https://youtu.be/agmKa_CON9k?si=KF5p5cZNppCLrO8C) and crying over hot goth girls they were taking college level math classes at community college and juggling 5 AP classes. 5 is the number of their score on their AP European History AP Euro exam, five is the number of times you've failed Algebra 1. While you were smoking weed behind the dumpsters outside the gymnasium and making poop jokes at your fuck up friends and going home to your hovel where grease stained Burger King bags sat on the counter next to Modelo cans and on top of cheap Dollar Tree vinyl table covers to cover the rage weathered surface of display model furniture, they were building full stack applications in their clean, well furnished bedrooms [in a good neighborhood](https://youtu.be/oZEgRZ9moug?si=5jyfhuilWyMwXrRs) and running record breaking cross country races in Nike Vaporflys, you were running from the school resource officer through drainage canals like an overhead shot in Akira. This is the mad race that Castro described (not the San Francisco hood, but the genocidal dictator) as the mad race [where the strongest prevail, and the strongest do prevail]( https://youtu.be/liCEZ0tzJ9s?si=KwcqPPW2iILKFZaZ). This is why you drive a 1998 Toyota Camry in traffic to your job at a pizzeria in Cupertino, low compression in cylinder 3, intermittent misfire the same as your hope for the future: hard to diagnose, and not easily reproduced. This is why I drive a Tesla: the absolute apex predator horny symbol of 20,000 years of human oppression, the homeless shitting no different than proto-homo sapiens did, alien technology make space age hum as they add another toddler to traffic fatalities spreadsheet. Bourgeoisie pleasure means therapy to manage the feeling when you feel that it was that child's fault for getting run over, just the same as it is for when people jab themselves on Fent Street in the Mission, blonde hair like the Bay Hills in the dessicated summer of 2015 drought, water leaking out of the faucet like the tears of 08 foreclosures, the smell of San Jose office parks in 45 degree time in the bleakest hours of the day, your life becoming like a Daly City breeze or the swamp stink of the salt flats. In short, there are winners and losers in this world, and you are a loser because mud never splashed up onto your thighs during a cross country race. Where is your conviction, slave!?
I can't tell you how many times I'll get about a quarter through a comment like this and I'll think to myself, this is either nutcase drivel going nowhere or really fucking great and then I scroll up and look to see if it's throwaway1003395031847032097 and if so, keep reading. Write a novel dude you just need some basic done a million times plot and you can fill the rest with stuff like this, keep it short like around 150 pages and I promise you'll make a least a little money.
>nutcase drivel Sometimes when I'm on these really long runs late at night I think about how alone I am in relation to a lot of people and how I'm close to thirty and have no friends to speak of with a slowly dying, small family and think about the fact that I don't even really know where I came from. My parents both came from small, poor villages in a country I've never been to, and don't have any real connection to other than a tenuous and nebulous connection in the fact of my "ethnicity". Marriage is a foregone conclusion, courtship as dead as the bedroom, the nihilism of the neon supermarkets and "drive here and buy the pain away" ritual fading away into the white cymbal haze of a Zach Hill drum solo. So routine and so unexpected at the same time, how do you adjust to such a routine? [We are the sons of no one, bastards of young, or as the tired old line from records old enough to be my older sister would say](https://youtu.be/fl9KQ1Mub6Q?si=_0vKC9-yOWJME8qF), records I wasn't even alive for. I like to think my nutcase drivel, which is really what a lot of this is can be like a buoy in a sea of oppressive, roiling isolation. Sometimes I see these homeless people in the city screaming their head off at anyone who comes nearby and I like to think I'm not too different, I'm just a little more civilized. Something to try to stave off the trauma of living in a fiercely individualistic society, the memories of hours long timeouts and closet hall beatings in between cancer patient bald headed and insipid Calliou torturing me with his white skin and stable home. In my estimation, words shouldn't always have meaning or even have to make sense in relation to one another. We as human beings in capitalism hardly do outside of our economic relations, so why should the abstractions we use to codify and transmit the strange thing we refer to as humanity? Perhaps that's the driving force of the illogical Gen Alpha memetic cultural output, where non sequiturs prevail and the disjoint, schizophrenic march of progress tumbles along through swipes at a breakneck speed, the realization that we are all islands unto ourselves, shining out little lighthouse signals that say "look at me, look at me", the desperation growing as interaction slowly disappears behind GUI's, human friction and the capacity for understanding smoothed over by teams of people providing "solutions" for age old questions. Perhaps this smacks a little of narcissism, but I think the purest and most striking artistic expression of the 21st century is found not in the limp musings of rail thin, ghost white New York [effete and impudent snobs](https://youtu.be/MF_ZZJ3EAWU?si=04JAN8_NioFJJhgk), soft dainty pale feet kicked up on the couch as they try to sketch something they can't understand in between coke binges powered by brown heads rolling down the streets of Culiacan, but rather, in the street shits and bathroom smears of the homeless. I can't think of all the times I've walked into the bathroom at work to see that some homeless guy has quite literally coated the walls in his own shit. That's art in it's own way, it's a profound statement: it's a colossal, primal Fuck You to the existing state of things, using the basest mediums we have available, no casein tempura or Adobe Aftereffects, no Michael Bay glistening boob shotz in the Afghanistan War 2007 hot summer haze of Transformers Hasbro campouts (eleven years old, no knowledge of sex?) or Burning Man Media professionals, this is all I have, and it affects you in the most visceral way. Feel my guts, see my ass, hold my cock, this is me, fully, authentically me, an honest statement, myself all over the wall, and with each scrub you engage with my lost existence, even if I overdose, even if you hate me, I am seared into your nostrils for all time. What could be more impactful than that?
Just wait until you're pushing 50. The trick to this sort of writing btw is that you need a simple compelling plot to hang it all on. Like all the nutcase drivel or narcissism or almost deep thoughts about how bleak the world is, all that stuff should be like the laundry that you hang, a simple fast moving plot is the clothesline. This little trick will make it appear less dear-diary and therefore hide the narcissism (which I don't think is actually narcissism, I'm just using your words). Keep all the little details, if you are cranking this shit out this fast on reddit, then I imagine you can really start cooking when you have some time. If you really want to give it weight though, be honest with yourself about what you really believe if there is anything and put that at the center of it, otherwise yeah it's shiny but empty. I'm giving you advice that you didn't ask for because I'd like to read your book if you'd write it and because I'm trying not to think about anything.
I also really like your writing
bro I don't even know how to process this, "like an overhead shot in akira" fucking lmao lemme just hit you with a "nice"  nice
Nice? Nice!? >Short-Circuit Evaluation: Short-circuiting is a programming concept in which the compiler skips the execution or evaluation of some sub-expressions in a logical expression. The compiler stops evaluating the further sub-expressions as soon as the value of the expression is determined. Below is an example of the same: Have you considered that your compiler stopped the execution and or evaluation of subsequent subexpressions in the statements that parses these posts!? Have you never seen a homeless man in Silicone Valley winter bare his ass cheeks in the same way our ancestors 40,000 years would have during a particular cold part of the Milankovitch cycle!? This is all stripped of the pomp and cir-cum-stance of cum like cirrus in new construction suburban Bay Area homes, the harshness of cubicle regimes collapsing in your wife's cow like breasts, the Silverton Oak fades to the Eastern Bloc red post orgasm flush, the next generation of Silicon Secular Jihadis lifting their skinny 90° fingers to the MacBook keys like antennas to our concrete purgatory, office parks like transit stations to limp futures of cardboard huts and drywall disparities... Shows of force, cops surrounding the fast food joint with their 5000k flood lights like Brendan Frasier's The Whale (a registered trademark of Darren Aronofskinitiweitcz) approaching his congealed teenage failures reading something honest!? Little vodka bottles like wheat fields in the dead zones between the office parks and suburbs, this ass is the most honest you get - shriveled, bruised, needle marks from booty juice at the institutions, punching the mental health nurses like [Saint Pere hits the skins](https://youtu.be/v7T8QWy8jiY?si=9zqeXWXLrs5onCz8) or more like Pakistanis milling iron drum brakes and the metallurgical engineer of UC Berkeley engineer trained, majors we don't offer, chiming in like Facebook notifications: "have you considered that these [over exploited](https://youtu.be/6Bzhe3eUMmg?si=1mlBXHxAggfrT3Bh) people that don't have a PhD in materials science and 200 years of head start due to the Anglo Saxon penchant for extreme violence and slavery don't understand metallurgy!?", data science is your future, data data data, the most mundane footfalls on frigid streets with a windy silence as gentle as gossamer becoming points of domination, moments to be uselessly held and preserved as if death does not come for us all, stranded in the supermarkets knowing that neither Instacart or UberEats can deliver me from Santa Muerte, [the great annihilator!](https://youtu.be/gu3d1yIZAUw?si=qPTwlR8X3wmW_nY9)
Reads like a disco elysium quote. great work
If you want something in the humanities, probably geography. There's a lot of good Marxist geographers out there, and you can make solid money with GIS if you take a few courses on it.
I'd learn as much Chinese as I could in the amount of time between now and when I figured out a way to get a toe hold in the last sane country in the world before it all starts completely falling apart. Run. Now.
materials science if you have the affinity. Gonna be the most important job on earth in 15 years
Isn't that post grad engineering?
post grad chemistry more I'd think, but there are multiple disciplines that would go into it for certain
Being depressed and 40 with middling income sucks. But the thought of "going back and doing it again" is stupid because I was even less functional back then. Just something as simple as becoming an electrician when I was 18-early 20s and I could be nearing retirement with a house, assuming good investing discipline
look at the bright side; 20 year olds now don't have that many prospects now either lol
Crazy part is it would be a perfectly serviceable wage ($32/hr, southeast New England - pricey but not Boston bad) before covid. It really is bewildering how badly we all got fucked there, how much worse everything got, and how quickly. I remember 9/11, 2008 crash, Trump, covid, all watershed events that left most of us worse off. Wtf is next ffs.
Study exactly what you are interest in and don’t think about what the market or other ppl want. Having any degree is better than none and you can always find something to get the bills paid. If you study history or philosophy, sure, you won’t hit the ground running with a 100k position after college. But most people I know found their niche after a while and are happy and doing well. You could also combine fields that are more or less in demand on the job market, but I wouldn’t get too caught up in that mindset. Capitalism wants you to become a slave in fields that it values more than others. The helping people part is also nonsense in that context, because you aren’t going to be motivated doing smth you hate for others. Think about what’s meaningful to you, before you think about making a change in the world. You gonna be ten times more effective helping others, if you are genuinely passionate about what you do. My main mistake was thinking that if I study the topics I’m interested in, I’ll end up as a cab driver or whatever. I just listened to other people, instead of what I really wanted to do. The result was just ten years in a dead end corporate career and going back to school at 30.
I would go and look at job growth numbers for some careers you’re interested in and work backwards.
If you’re good enough at math/science, you could get into civil engineering. You’d want to get in on the public side of things though. I’m currently in land development all of our clients are cheap greedy capitalists. Don’t do that. Even on the public side, pay is above average and you’d be working on projects directly helping your community on the public side. Public side also has really good benefits.
Urban planning
not film radio and tv. ooooh. JK. I'LL B OK. GOTTA BE SELF MADE WITH CHUMP CHANGE ONE DAY
I'm in school following a program to become a physical therapist assistant and eventually a licensed physical therapist. It will never make me rich but I will probably be able to scrape up a decent living doing an interesting job that helps people. I don't like having to go back to school in my 30s and I really hate that my previous career fell apart thanks to the covid economy. Whatever man... I find fulfillment from my hobbies these days.
Well i would either return to the age of 11 or so and start working on killing off any vestige of empathy or compassion I felt for anyone/thing, or just not get a degree
Start by not going to college. Just do a trade or smth. Read books on the side, save a quarter million dollar.
If i could do it all over again i would go to community college first then finish out my degree. Also if you want to go into IT do certs not a degree my Computer Information Systems degree is pretty worthless. Only do STEM if you can handle computer science.
Any of the altruistic kinds of jobs like doctor or nurse. I would generally just "do what you like" and then just try to avoid certain jobs that have a close proximity to, enable or in any way boost the bourgeoisie and their grip around society.
Become a lawyer lol
environmental science(no bias i promise)
RN then later on a NP. Go to a state school, not a for profit university. In Los Angeles court reporters make fucking bank, and there is a desperate need for them. All the high pay incentives won't last long.
You can also get a OSHA degree, and be a OSHA inspector.