Submitted 2 hours ago by Grumpy404@lemmy.zip to [deleted]
Ive been out of school for a year or 2 (i lost count) and i still have no idea what i want to do in life nor do i have any hobbys or things to do for fun. I have many dreams but i give up on those dreams after like a 2 weeks and then think of some other dream. I wish school prepared me for all this freetime but idk, i just feel lost right now…
Im just wondering how i can figure things out now? i could use advice of sorts?
This is kinda hard to answer without knowing your situation. I mean if you could get into harvard could you cover the cost? So basically everyon has a limited set of options to follow. Even given that I can say I knew I wanted to be a science major based on my high school grades and fascination with how viruses replicate from the whirling blender experiment. I intended to do research and teach. I graduated but did not get through a PhD so that was out. I then worked in industry and found it really did not pay the bills well enough. Im lucky to have tech be this thing which almost anyone could do at the time if you were good with that stuff and make decent cash (you could say that its this way now but its really not the same). I worked in the field but with some serial unemployment but the only significant amount was in relation to the housing market crash. Now however im older and unemployed for over 2 years. So. Anyway. I guess im saying is you make choices from your options and even then things can go all over the place. Im glad I got a good liberal arts and sciences education because I kinda like learning. Im glad I did tech because you have to learn all the time. If I lived in a better society I think I would be generally happy. I sometimes think of things I could do different but I also see it pretty much going the same way really or not as its all kinda a roll of a die.
Take random jobs.
Take random courses. (College or vocational)
A lot of people stumble into their carrers. Don’t sweat it to much if you don’t have to.
Just try things. You’ll figure out what you like/don’t like fairly quickly and you might stumble into something you absolutely love.
My opinion is that you need to find some hobbies, like number one most important thing. Your hobbies are your true vocation, work is what you do to pay for them. Start small if you’re not rolling in money, there are lots of cheap ways to make art, or you could learn to cook more from scratch. Try out a musical instrument, write some bad poetry, build a Gundam model.
Finding work for now does not have to determine your career. Temp agencies are actually kind of great (in an icky sort of way) because they already found a lot of the jobs from office buildings to warehouses to factories. In fact a whole lot of companies only hire through temp agencies. If you want to try a trade walk up to a local shop and ask if they need a green helper.
I’m in my 30’s and still don’t know what the fuck I want to do most of the time. Just do what makes you happy in your free time and what makes you money for work. If you can make those things overlap, fantastic. But I’ve always found that doing what I love for money makes me love it less. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to get it all figured out. Noone has it all figured out by the time they die, and it’s not worth wasting your time worrying instead of living.
Be good to yourself and others and you’ll have few regrets.
I’m 42 and this is great advice. I still don’t know what the fuck I want to do with my life. I have a job that pays decent and I don’t hate it, this second part is really important. I have a fun and fulfilling time in my free time. That’s about all I can ask for.
Be good to yourself and others and you’ll have few regrets.
Super important!
i struggled with this after high school too. i hated school so much all i could think about was getting out so i never planned anything for my future. ended up doing community college for a few years before choosing a degree to get kinda randomly just to get away from home. after graduating it turned out i hated the work and i decided i needed a change, which brings me to the part that might help you.
when it came down to actually deciding what to do with my future i sat down and asked myself, if i could do literally anything i wanted, like life was an open world rpg video game and all i had to do was pick something i wanted and go for it, what would i do? completely ignore what other people might think, or what they might expect from you, or whether what you want is hard as fuck, or even whether you think you can do it or not. the main thing is to get to the unfiltered truth of what you want, deep down. where you go from there is up to you, but if you can figure out what you really want im guessing youll find the motivation to make it happen.
when i did this for myself it felt so liberating. i settled on space exploration, which is pretty broad, and wound up deciding to go back to school to study engineering. it was honestly terrifying because id never even done calculus and if it didnt work out i didnt know how i was going to live, but im really glad i did because it all worked out.
hopefully this helps you. just remember the most important thing is to be honest with yourself.
tldr: exercise, learn to cook, and start saving some money (keep your expenses low as long as you can)
I know a lot has changed since I was 18 but if I could give myself some advice to get a better start in life on a second try, here are a the first things that I would share.
Two main ideas here:
Find some kind of movement exercises that you enjoy doing and can make a routine of. You don’t need to be an athlete or anything. It could be a daily walk, yoga, jogging, weight training, climbing, cycling, sports. For sports, I would look at things that are easy to keep up with as you get older, typically things with less structure or equipment requirements. For example, American football or volleyball might be harder to manage than tennis/pickle ball or indoor soccer/football. Don’t make it a chore; you don’t have to be great (or even good) at any of it, just find something that you want to keep up with. I know a lot of people also make connections with other people in some of these places (like climbing, cross fit, and sports gyms) but those also tend to be more expensive options.
Learn to cook (if you don’t already know how) and try to build a short list of reasonably healthy recipes that you enjoy and could live on every day, if needed. Try to focus on simple things to start, like eggs or oatmeal for breakfast, healthy sandwiches or wraps for lunch (try to minimize processed meats or peanut butter), for dinner maybe pastas, casseroles, salads, roasted vegetables & potatoes.
Try to come up with things that are quick and easy to make and especially things that can be made from staples that last a long time in the pantry or fridge. For a lot of people, planning, shopping for, and preparing food every day is a major challenge once when added to a job, school, or family. However, if you have a reliable list of foods that you can repeat without much effort, that takes away a major point of stress in your future life.
For me, a big part of “low stress” is know that you can walk away at any time because you have a safety net. In my case, I can’t quit my job because my family needs the income, which makes stupid things stress me out more than they should. However, when I was a teenager working low wage retail and fast food jobs, they did not stress me out because I knew I could walk out the door at any time without caring. From the outside looking in, my current job pays much better and is much more chill than working retail but I was way less stressed flipping burgers while living at home as a teenager.
The biggest “mistakes” I made after I graduated high school were eating a ton of fast food while going to college, dropping my gym routine when my parents canceled our membership when I was 20, and rushing to move out with my friends about the same time. The result of those things caused me to get fat and deeply in debt in my 20s and it took me all of my 30s to get back to even. I was probably around 35 when I got back to anything close to my high school graduation body weight and around 40 before my net worth went positive and I started any meaningful retirement savings.
School unfortunately does a pretty bad job preparing folks for what comes after. You go from a strictly regulated lifestyle where you are given very little freedom to a lifestyle you have to construct on your own.
The best way to figure things out is to give it a try. Maybe you saw a flyer for a trivia night and that vaguely interests you? Give it a try. Did a video about making a ship in a bottle catch your eye? Give it a try. Did you see someone having a really good time riding a skateboard and idly wonder if it’d be fun? Give it a try.
You shouldn’t feel bad on trying stuff and not continuing with them after a bit. That just means you weren’t really into that thing as much as you thought you might be.
A lot of the stuff you try might not be for you. I found out that I hate trivia at bars through personal experience. But that’s ok, cuz I also found out I love karaoke at bars when the karaoke crowd came in after trivia. You’ll meet people you like. You’ll meet people you dislike. You’ll meet people you are largely ambivalent about. It might take awhile, but you should only move at your own pace. Don’t worry about other people and stay focused on yourself.
Something important to learn is that you should not be defined by your job. Your job is just something you do to pay the bills. If you are lucky, you’ll have a job that you like and is personally fulfilling, but that’s pretty rare in this day and age. You are much more likely to find happiness and fulfillment outside your job.
Try to enjoy the little things in life. I have been trying to make the perfect breakfast for a few years now as a way to get myself to enjoy waking up in the morning. Stack up your little joys and hopefully, you’ll have enough joy for the entire day. Maybe even enough joy to share with others.
Much like exercise, there’s no real shortcut to self-actualization. You’ll need to do a lot of experimentation to find what you like an enjoy. I would recommend finding a consumptive hobby and a constructive hobby. You most likely already have tried a bunch of consumptive hobbies, as our society encourages consumption. If you haven’t I would highly recommend experimenting with constructive hobbies, where you make stuff. It doesn’t have to be drawing art, it can be stuff like working with wood, assembling models, writing reviews to bad movies. Anything where you add something to the world that didn’t exist before. Consumptive hobbies I enjoy are reading books and eating cookies. Constructive hobbies I enjoy are making linoprints and baking cookies.
Your fears and doubts are ones that countless humans have experienced. They overcame those doubts and I’m sure you can too. You are not alone in your struggles and if things ever get too tough, there are always people willing to lend you a hand.
Good luck, buddy.
The great thing is, you don't!
You just keep finding things that seem fun for a while until either they are not or you die.
You decide.
And you work at it.
Change your mind? Fine . Then work at it.
Don’t give up because it’s hard. Change only because it’s wrong for you.
And work at it.
Imagine that your body is like a metal detector, but instead of making noise it makes emotions. Excitement is the primary signal that you’re going in the right direction. Fear is a secondary signal. If you do something because you are afraid of something else, that’s the wrong direction usually. If you do something because it excites you, that’s the right direction. Sometimes, if you are afraid of something that’s the thing you should do (lean into the fear).
This is how you “figure it out”. There is no framework, there is no rubric. Everything you can be told from the outside is already outdated. The clearest most accurate signal will always come directly from your experience of your body
My advice - get out there now and put yourself in different scenes and see what you actually enjoy being immersed in. Go to a locally owned hippy farm. Apply to be an extra on a local movie set. ask to take a tour at a local power plant. Do all the events you can, ask to see inside whatever business or org you can think of and talk to people. Show interest when you are interested. Don’t let fear of being annoying stop you. That’s the only way you’re going to figure out what you really want to do. And that’s how you’ll meet the right people
“local movie set”
American?
Are you really a teenager? If you actually are I will pm you my advice so you know i’m not doing it for upvotes. It’s a knowledge bomb of pro’s and con’s.
I had to jerk off a lots of dudes to figure that out .
I joined the military while still a senior in high school. I left for basic training literally 2 weeks after graduating. I figured it’d be sometime cool to experience for a few years while I figured out what to do with my life.
Turns out the benefits were too good. I ended up staying for a full 20 years before qualifying for an official retirement and pension. I retired 4 years ago, at 38 years old, and have just been sitting around my house enjoying some solid “me” time.
Every time I think about going back into the workforce, I think about all the drama the civilian sector has to deal with. In the military, everything was organized. All your rules, procedures, protocols, etc. were written down and everyone had to follow them. We were all on the same page.
The civilian sector is a bit like the Wild West compared to that structure. Not to mention, I had job security while serving. I’d sign up for 4-6 years of service at a time and I literally had to be thrown in jail before I’d get “fired” during that time. Which gave me freedom to speak my mind at work more often. In the civilian sector, I have to watch my tongue at work.
So here I am, currently 42 years old, and I still don’t know what to do with my life. I’m just living each day as it comes and going with the flow, investing my time in interests and hobbies. I have plans and projects in my life, and I’m slowly working toward personal goals. But do I have my whole life mapped out? Not in the slightest. Heck, I don’t even know what I’m doing next week.
Join a travelling carnival, spend some time living off canned alphagetti and meeting people. I ran the Octopus ride.
My advice is think of a practical skill you feel comfortable with and learn it well. If it’s useful at any stage of technology, you will have a decent job secure for the rest of your life even if society advances a lot or falls to the stone age.
With that kind of foundation in place, you can then have fun (responsibly) or even afford to build a family with someone. Long term, it is what’s useful, though you might miss out on the dumb risks of youth (which are totally peer/social pressure) and cause you to do dumb crap when hit by middle age anxiety.
Contramuffin@lemmy.world 11 minutes ago
High school really doesn’t expose you to many, if at all, real careers. I essentially lucked into the career that I’m in. I wouldn’t be that concerned that you don’t really have any ideas for a career that you’d be interested in - that’s pretty expected.
That being said, you probably should find some interests. Do some volunteering if you’ve got no idea what to do. There’s a lot of good community work that needs to be done, and it’ll expose you to many real careers