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.
I’m not in the free software movement, though I’m trying to be (my job drains all my will to continue to write code after work). Right now all my externally derived meaning has to come from trying to raise children with as little trauma as possible.
We software people are generally not good at things like that. We are also generally not good at knowing what kinds of software we could write to help you, or people who have done other things you have done. We are also generally not good at writing things that regular people read to understand what we’ve done.
For real, contributing documentation to otherwise excellent open source software projects would be something really valuable that you could probably do right now.