Hi comrades,
Long time lurker, very rare poster here. To make a long story short, I’m a humanist MA in my 30s who burned out of my first “real” corporate job. Struggled to find anything else, and started to worry that all the normal jobs my education qualified me to get were the same types soul-sucking office busywork. I quit, took a break and started working with kids (where I live government-subsidized childcare is a thing, so there are a lot of opportunities), but I’m again feeling burnt out. It’s way more engaging and meaningful than the office work, but now my issue is that I don’t feel intellectually stimulated at all. I’m in this fucked up limbo where on one hand, I’ve been conditioned to believe that my education is worthless in material terms (which it kind of is), and at the same time, I also know that I’m pretty smart, really good at doing research and have things to say - I just have no idea how to utilize these skills barring a return to academia - which kind of feels like running away (back to the ivory tower, I guess).
My question is this, are there any jobs that; a) provides an actual meaningful and valuable service, b) is still accessible to someone in their early 30s who wasted a lot of years not improving their CV, c) actually requires some conscious thought. Other than that, I’m open to anything. High pay is not a priority to me. If it also involves learning a skill that might be useful in a less than optimistic future, that’s also a plus.
TL;DR: classic failed humanist with barely any CV. Tell me what to do, please.
If you’re working with kids and find that meaningful, that seems kinda the most you can hope for. Do that and do book clubs or other intellectually stimulating stuff in your free time. Reduce your hours if you can.
It’s more meaningful than what I did before, for sure, and I feel almost ungrateful for wanting out again. But the challenges are both that it is, a lot of the time pretty mind-numbing, involves a lot of conflict and social stuff that is pretty tough on me (social anxiety) and also makes me feel I’ll never be really good at it. Add to that the fact that the field faces constant cuts by neoliberal politicians and that the hours, pay and benefits are nearly non-existent, and it just feels a bit like a dead end. Sorry for not explaining that in the OP - writing this stuff out helps me work through my own reasoning though, so thanks