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.
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Yeah, I should definitely have specified - I made it sound like I had an academic position lined up or something - I would be applying at PhD level if I wanted to get back in, and they don’t hand out a lot of those where I am. There are also a lot of reasons I don’t want to try to get back to academia. Terrible working conditions, publishing pressure, academic politics, no job guarantee at all, and the knowledge that the extremely specialized work you do will only ever be useful to other specialists - if even them. I very seriously considered this path when I finished my MA (had some attention, some professors nudging me to try), and all my friends who went that way are in situations I’m not envious of right now (except maybe in the sense that they get to sound “smart” and I don’t).
why would academia be running away if its intellectually stimulating
The right wing brain rot in this country has spread far and wide. If you work in the public sector or academia, you might as well be all the awful shit Elon talks about
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I didn’t really explain very well why I don’t want to work in academia (calling it “running away” kind of suggests I could get a job in academia - not a guarantee at all with my experience etc), but jumping straight to attributing my choices to “right wing brainrot” is a bit dramatic, don’t you think?
My apologies, I’m just describing the zeitgeist
Same boat, but late 30s. Find meaning outside of work.
Right, I get that sentiment, but working a job that I found downright meaningless broke me to the point where I had zero energy or motivation to do anything meaningful outside of work. I need to see myself somewhat in my work to not feel like I am actively giving myself depression.
Maybe I should have phrased it more in terms of asking for inspiration rather than searching for meaning. I’m essentially someone without a career saying “what careers are even viable for me at this point?”
The whole economy needs to be remade, piece by piece. Once I realized this, it became pretty clear that the game plan was to understand how capitalist businesses/industries work, save money through communal forms of living, and use the proceeds to get communal enterprises off the ground.
I’m not far from you in age and I am very short on credentials, but l have the ability to assess resource flows and inefficiencies in businesses and outline how those might be rectified through workers’ cooperative or communal models. It’s really not that hard, a well-rounded education at high-school level would give you all the tools you need.
In other words, my career path is communism.
This is where I’m at. I’m 36, I hate my job, but it pays better than most things around here and I don’t know how to do anything else. Sinking into my hobbies relieves some of the stress. Most people hate their jobs and I feel lucky to not be mining coal or something that leads to an early grave. I know, as a good communist I should strive for more and rally against the current system. I have in the past, and I would if there was any sort of support system. However, I need to focus on playing the hand I was dealt. Detaching from the “politics” of my job and just let management and coworkers fuck up is helping with my mental state. At the end of the day, I’m just a cog, and if I keep putting out fires behind the scenes, my managers will just keep getting away with it and what’s more, they will get the credit for when I “deep state” things to work out well.
I know this isn’t the advice that OP was looking for, but there’s something to be said for checking out a little and not letting work get to you as bad. As long as your bills are getting paid I guess
Your life is like a mirror to mine. Checking out helped me a lot, but I find it really hard not to care about things I know can be improved and know how to improve, so I always tend to fall back into the work trap again.
Me too. I’m trying to just make peace with it. My window is closing for being able to do anything else
Thanks, lovely idea. You might have missed the part where I’m a humanist devoid of practical skills. Once the free software movement realizes it needs someone really good at analyzing modernist literature, I’m all in
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.
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I’m curious how - writing documentation seems like it would be hard without the prerequisite IT knowledge. Even if it’s not a career path, I’m also always thinking about ways to feel like I contribute more.
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
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.
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That’s probably an option. I think those fields are hard to enter without a lot of experience, at least on anything more than freelance basis, but it’s definitely a good suggestion.
One immediate piece of advice I can give you is to read Bullshit Jobs, so you can spot the draining and soul-sucking nonsense, and focus in the things that make the job good.
You ever think about civil/environmental engineering and just generally that industry and field of work?
You could become a soils technician, a Water treatment operator, or even an engineer. There are some states that even offer engineering licensure to those without a degree.
It’s a fulfilling field in most cases.
I’m not in the states, but I will for sure consider these kind of options. I really wish I had considered the merits of an engineering degree when I was younger. But I had the classic mathophobia and just went path of least resistance when choosing a field of study.
You don’t really need to be that good at math to be a good civil engineer, it involves a lot more legalese and management skills
Can I ask why you don’t feel intellectually stimulated? And my next question, would you rather make that job intellectually stimulating or find a career that’s a better fit?
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