Heavy Metal. Most things with screaming/growling that has actual lyrics are gold to me. Ice Nine Kills manages to blend that with my love of the horror genre, and discovering them felt like finding a new home.
Honestly? You don’t. I was gonna try to be a sysadmin but I’m a product support engineer now. The point being shit doesn’t always work out the way you plan. Find something you are interested in, or think about what you truly enjoy doing. For me, it is quite simply the act of helping someone get something done, and fixing various software problems. No matter what job I have, if I can do one or both of those things and make a living I think I’ll be happy with it. Hope this helps.
You don’t. You’re highly likely going to go through some big psychological changes as you age that will probably cause perspective shifts about just who you are and what you want. And that’s biological. You’re going to experience other things that aren’t biological products that cause perspective shifts. You at 18 and you at 35 should be two fairly different people.
Hopefully you can find something that you continue to enjoy throughout life. If not it’s really not a big deal. Do what you have to, take opportunities given to you as they arise and you’ll probably end up somewhere you never expected. Work is work is work. Even if you love the field you can still hate work. It’s easier to make a change in career than to pigeonhole yourself into something that presents no way to diversify.
Honestly, I couldnt figure it out myself. I just took whatever job I could get at the time. I ended up sticking with it and working my way up. I still wish I could have done something more with my career, but having worked with a lot of young people over the years, Ill say this. Work whatever job you can take. Even if you hate it, just try it out. Figure out what you enjoy, and what you dont. Its ok to jump around. But most importantly, give it your best.
I see to many young people (and older people) who come in, hate the job and just put zero effort into it. Yeah, you may be quitting in a few months, or a few years, whatever. But every job is an opportunity to learn new skills. Those skills will usually transfer over to whatever job you do eventually settle into, though most of the time it wont be so obvious. Be it work ethic, speed, ability to follow directions, knowledge about a topic, how to be a salesman, etc. To me, that seems like the best way to get what you can from any job, even if you dont enjoy the work.
Try something and probably change your mind later. Not having payed a fortune for an education before your change of heart would be extremely helpful though.
Try to pick something that gives you freedom instead of limiting yourself. A craft might be good, or an internship before studying if possible.
Well, I would say first, don’t be afraid that you’ll pick the wrong thing. Keep an open mind and research and try different things. Like some others have said, generally avoid the idea of picking something you love, unless that is something that has a good demand/supply ratio of workers. Otherwise you’ll be competing with other people who love the same thing, in a race to the bottom in terms of both money and work conditions.
Here are a few things that could help:
There are probably many online articles and websites that provide additional/updated ideas and resources.
Your local public library should have a section with books on the topic of choosing a career. Ask your librarian for help.
If you’re still in high school, find out if they offer aptitude testing and other career counseling. If not, check your local community college to find out if they do. Another option that’s less accessible (price and distance) but that you may find worthwhile is the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation (www.jocrf.org)
Disclaimer: some of this advice is a little United-States focused, but you should be able to generalize it to many other countries.
I didn’t even think about the library! I’ll check that out later. Once high school starts again, I’ll ask them if they offer career counseling. Thank you.
Truthfully, it’s a huge thing to ask an eighteen-year-old to plan for the rest of their life over the next couple of years. For some people, they might need to take a year or two off before even thinking about going to school again; others, they might go to a trade school instead, or just not even bother with college all together.
I think the “best general advice” I would give is to just try out community college for a bit and take classes, join clubs, and/or participate in activities that interest you - don’t even worry about gen ed stuff until you’re sure you want to continue into a 4-year college for a bachelor’s or higher degree. Start working jobs that either genuinely interest you or offer a decent wage & benefits so you can at least have some sort of “work experience” to fall back on, and just explore stuff that interests you or sounds interesting. And if you’re in the camp of “I don’t have any interests”, then do random shit and see what sticks or not.
In general, I think the worst thing to do after high school is nothing and stay stuck in the same position in life. As long as you’re doing something that you want to do, that’s gonna be a step in the right direction.
Thanks for the the advice for always be doing something. I will probably not go to a 4 year collage unless I’m really sure that I want a collage degree because I don’t want to be stuck in debt and have wasted my time. I’ll keep all of this in mind.
Basically photoshop and games. I was dual booting and when I switched computer it wasn't worth reinstalling because I spent most of my time in windows. This was a long time ago.
Now that windows is moving into subscription basis I keep thinking I should try getting into linux again but I don't have the time to fiddle around making stuff work.
Apart from Steam I mostly use consoles for gaming these days so it would only be Photoshop I guess ( I think ms office works on Linux now?). Gimp is cool but it still can't do everything photoshop does and I find the GUI counterintuitive.
The one thing I still do use Linux for is booting with a thumbdrive when a computer running Windows has a meltdown.
Every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
I used Linux desktop as my work rig for a year and a half. I absolutely hated it, had constant problems and lost time almost every day to stupid workarounds. When I tried to search or ask for help the answer I was usually met with was “your hardware is wrong” or “why do you want to do that” or more often than no “you’re using the wrong distro, you should use [different one every time]”. I also found the UI to be quite ugly and often obtuse, you can tell that there’s very few open source UI/UX designers. I switched back to windows and I’ve had better performance and less bugs.
Do you feel like you ever got over the initial setup period? A lot of what you are describing is what I encounter after a fresh install but I don’t typically have any issues after a little bit of tweaking.
Maybe because it was a work laptop I didn’t spend as much time on setup as I would for a personal computer. There’s were a lot of issues that I solved with tweaking at the start, but many of the lingering issues either had no solution or were so intermittent or complex that I couldn’t figure out how to word it in a way that would lead me to the solution.
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