I know my parents didn’t think the world was stable when the Korean war and then Vietnam were going on plus Cold War, acid rain, ozone depletion and women had very few rights. Blacks couldn’t vote in the USA so that caused spillover problems in Canada. When I was your age it was a recession, gas had been horrendously expensive, interest rates were high teens or 20s, recent university grads were going on to second degrees because there was no work to be had - although post secondary debt wasn’t as high as now because you literally couldn’t borrow that much money unless your parents were rich and could afford to pay it.
What I’m saying is that very rarely does anyone in your age group feel like the world is going their way. Figure what you able to do, a combination of your talents and your likes, and figure out the cheapest way to learn how to do it if it means post secondary education or trades or your own time. Most people cannot find something they LOVE to do that will also pay the bills. Or even if you do love it, making it pay the bills is a good way to eventually hate it. In regards to bills, what life do you, not your parents/friends, want to live? Your needs might be less or more than anothers. One person can have a great life on $50K and another “needs” $200K. Where do you need to live? Many people get stuck on staying where they grew up but if you look to previous generations, many had to move to get to where their job and their life aligned. There are probably many, many jobs that you have never heard of and therefore haven’t considered. Career counselling can help.

1. Be quick to adapt and learn. Whatever field you enter is going to look completely different in 30 years (if it even remains), so if you can adapt quickly and learn whatever skills are newly relevant, you’ll be in a decent place. In most employers there’s a large barrier to hiring someone new, so if your field is becoming irrelevant / automated / transformed, but you’re able to start doing some of the new work that your employer needs doing, then your role will grow to encompass that work and you’ll remain relevant and valuable to your employer. By adapting and picking these tasks up, you essentially can rotate out of irrelevant skills into relevant ones while keeping your job and seniority.
2. I’m not sure how AI affects this, but going with the “adapt and learn” of the previous point, focus more on having a lot of general skills rather than getting really investing in a few specific ones. Most jobs aren’t going to be pure <field>. In my career so far (I’m about a decade older than you for what it’s worth), I’ve differentiated myself from other statisticians & data scientists by also being strong at software development. My classmates from where I did my master’s are better statisticians than me, but they’re limited in what they can do because while they can develop a great model, they struggle to get it running well in a production environment. That limits their employability. I, on the other hand, had no problem with that and was able to have great success at my previous employer. I was then able to leverage that particular experience / skill combination to get my current job, where my employer was explicitly seeking only people with this combination of skills (and struggles quite a bit to find them!)
   • I would suggest focusing on developing skills that are complementary to whatever field you enter.
3. It’s hard to say what AI will look several years from now given how fast it’s changing, but so far I’ve noticed that its outputs can be either okay or very awful, and only someone who understands the field of that output can tell which of those outcomes it is. That’s why experienced programmers who use AI for coding are able to get some value (they filter out the awful output), while people who don’t understand coding ship slop. Ditto for other fields. Going with the “be okay at lots of skills” of my previous point, I suspect that this would help you get more out of AI than most people as you could more effectively filter out bad AI output in a variety of areas, which could give you a leg up.

Tl;DR always be learning new skills; focus on quantity over quality.

Not sure this is comforting, but I e always gotten by by going where the demand is. I didn’t know anything about the industry my first job was in, but the company was hiring like crazy so I applied. Stayed there for a few years, applied to whatever I could find to get out of there and sit out my non-compete, then kept going from job to job in that industry because there was demand.

A huge amount of it was luck. But it helped that I didn’t try to pick some job or industry then hope I could find work, but rather I looked where there was work and just went there.

Is staking your sense of stability on your career the wrong way to think about this?

Of fuck yeah that’s the worst way. Do what you have to do to get paid, but then find as much meaning as you can elsewhere.

If it makes you feel better, in Sweden, the average age of students is 25. Why? A lot of them do what they want and figure things out first before deciding. A lot travel, work, or save money before going to college. It’s the norm for them.

Meanwhile for the rest of the world, we’re pressured to figure things out as soon as we leave high school. Looking back, it’s mainly because we are pressured by our parents to go to college. It became a status symbol and bragging rights for them if their kids went to college.

You don’t. We live in a fucked up society and nothing about this situation will changed until society changes at a fundamental level.

We’re fucked mate.

A lot of negativity online and in this thread but imo that doesn’t really represent the world. There’s more career paths and options today then there ever was. If you have no responsibilities (family etc) then you should allow yourself to explore and time to build something.

Don’t be afraid of weird or “low skill” - everything builds skills and connects to more opportunities but most importantly now more than ever it’s important to be quitter - so you can actually leave at diminishing returns point and take advantage of new opportunities.

You don’t. You get a new job every two years.

Despite what the Boomers have told you, “stability” is a thing of the past. Your best opportunity for growth and regular raises is to constantly switch jobs until you’ve contributed enough to your 401K to retire. And if you don’t have a 401K, get one ASAP. Don’t wait until your late 30s like I did or you’ll be working until you drop dead. Take advantage of that employer match ASAP. It’s basically free money on the table. (And if your employer doesn’t offer a 401K with a match, well that’s yet another reason to switch jobs.)

Also, I know this won’t make you feel better, but you really do need to make sure that you’re both happy with your choice of major, and able to make money from it. Otherwise you will struggle even more than the rest of us. I fucked around and dropped out because I didn’t know what I wanted for a career, and I’m still paying for it. I will never know what it feels like to own a new car or anything nice. (FWIW I’d likely be in the same situation even if I did graduate, because I unfortunately picked STEM as my major and anyone who has gone down that path can tell you how useless of a degree it is.)

It fucking sucks that life is this way, but that’s the reality we live in. When I was your age it took me about a decade to come to terms with the fact that the American dream only existed for two generations in America (Boomers and Gen X); everybody else gets to suffer. You’ll eventually come to terms with it as well. Or you’ll get mad enough at the billionaires that killed the American Dream and start a revolution.

Stuff like plumbing and electrician work seems to be pretty stable.

I’m older but have the same sense you have. I think your best bet is to choose a career to pursue based on the kind of contribution you’d like to make to the world.

Right now, AI is mostly changing the way some jobs are done. Other new tech will probably contribute to more of those kinds of changes. If you choose a career primarily based a skillset you like using, I think there’s a good chance you’ll end up very disappointed later when the way the jobs are done changes. But if you choose based on impact and then develop a range of skills (especially people skills!), you’re more likely to end up OK.

You mentioned that programming and urban development interested you. Urban development seems more directly about making a certain kind of impact, so in your shoes, I’d go that direction. That said, I don’t know why you’re interested in programming, and maybe there’s an impact you want to make in that field too.

I made the mistake of choosing a career based on a skillset. New technology has reduced jobs in my field, but the much larger problem is that I hate the way the jobs are done now. I could probably stay motivated and do the extra shit needed to survive in that career in the longer term if I still felt like it made a positive impact on society, but the field itself doesn’t make the world better. So I made a shift into a new industry, although I’m not expecting stability from this one either, and it’s not one that would make sense for you based on your post.

Join the union building trades my dude. Wake up early, make six figures, and get paid to be trained. We dont go into debt for education. We go into debt buying boats and shit.

I received some great advice once: when you die nobody will read your resume. Do with that what you will.

I think stuff like urban planning and designing walkable environments would be cool, but I’m not sure if that’s a viable path in 2027 and beyond

Without knowing that much about the field, I would think that urban design should stick around long into the future. Those projects take decades to complete, and there’s always new cities and developments.

Even if the US is currently drinking the stupid juice when it comes to what makes a good city, either that will change soon or you can apply your skills to projects outside of the US

It depends on what you actually like to do. For something like computer science, I wouldn’t pursue a higher education. This was my path. CS was the hot thing back then (it might look like it still is sometimes, but it’s not really, it’s a lot more like plumbing now). I ended up with a PhD in CS, which is essentially useless. In CS, the only thing that matters, after understanding the basics, is keeping up with new tech and learning for yourself. No college degree can really prepare you for this. Now, if you want to be a doctor, you wouldn’t be able to skip the degree. That’s why I said it depends.

Personally, for my job, if I went back I wouldn’t pursue a higher education anymore. I was doing perfectly well learning by myself even before high school. If you are able to get into an online community of people with the same interest, you’ll be able to learn a lot more, and build a network of contacts. You’ll skip useless subjects and just build up what matters.

My advice to you is to follow your passion (everything will fail anyway, so that’s how you get motivation to keep going). After you know what you want to do, then decide if you need a course or if you can get a job and learn by yourself in order to progress. Unless the job you’re seeking requires some kind of credential, like medicine or law, then you can progress much faster by doing. It won’t look like at first, but you will. If you end up pursuing a higher education, then my advice is to try and go through it as quickly as possible. The goal is to get out quickly. Staying in academia has a terrible cost for the mind. If you lose your mind, you’ll lose everything later.

Man, I remember when I was 23, good times! Yeah, gonna be real things like work, school, and all that productive stuff won’t make you feel stable. I spent a lot of my time wondering about that phrase that happiness is what you make of it.

When I was like 19, I felt I had no path forward and my dumbass served 6 years in the US Army. I had a near death experience in Iraq when I got fucking blown up and you know what went through my head? Was it the incredible team meetings when I was an NCO, the great grades I had in school, the awesome days of work when I got a lot done? No, it was the time I spent with friends, getting so drunk I passed out in a field, going to gaming tournaments, bowling, and all that. So what’s gonna matter in the end isn’t going to be anythong ‘productive’ at all.

Work and school are oh so much fucking applesauce. And hell, making more friends does help with jobs. I got my job now, as a civilian, because of the friendships I made in the Army.

…I feel like I old man rambled. Yeah, get out there and make friends. Literally just talk to people. Out of nowhere. Hell yeah.

An important thing to note is that AI is actually not capable of replacing jobs. It can streamline some jobs in a limited capacity.

The perception that AI is replacing jobs is a lie that’s spread by both employers and AI companies for various reasons.

The AI companies want to spread it because it makes their products look better to employers. It’s just marketing for them.

Employers are claiming that AI is replacing jobs because they overhired during and after Covid lockdowns and the industry is correcting for the oversaturation now that the economy has gotten tighter. But layoffs from reduced profits looks really bad to shareholders, and the company wants to look good to keep the stock up. Because of thus, they’re trying to spin the narrative that AI’s increase in productivity let them reduce positions despite it not being true.

All that being said, the job market is tough. If you’re good at math, engineering is usually a good pick. There’s been a shortage of mechanical engineers in a lot of the US over the past decade. These are jobs that pay well, and if you’re competent and willing to move you shouldn’t have trouble finding a job. That being said, the areas with the biggest shortages tend to be rural, though they’re often still within 1hr of a city.

The big catch for engineering is that school is damned hard. For my degree, I consistently needed 18-20 credit hours of classes each semester to finish in 4 years. Between that, studying, work, and hobbies that can be a difficult proposition. Plus, you still need to have soft skills like communication. You’re going to have a harder time getting a job if you can’t hold a conversation.