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.
Can you start your own gig teaching children some useful skill in regards to your education? Business administration and distilling your expertise into a curriculum stands to be a lot of brainpower. Like if you had a room where children had to build bridges with popsicle sticks or something similarly hands on learning beyond what the curriculum normally affords them then you have a nice value proposition.
I was at a party for my friend and I was holding pads for him so that he could punch and kick. The kids wanted to join in so I showed them some combos they could throw. Then they got to fight me for a little bit. The parents were all impressed and said that if they could give their kids to me and they come back exhausted a few hours later then it’s an awesome business. I feel squeamish about kids because they yearn to hurt themselves, are very emotional, and the idea that they can be exploited makes me want to stay uninvolved.
But setting sail with a friend to do marketing, sales, business admin, organizing, creating a product, finding a space, building out a space, managing a space, and communicating with clients is stimulating work. If you can distill what you learned in school such that it would be valuable to a child then you might have something to contribute.