[cynical rant – take with a bucket of salt]

you don’t

you pick something that you are competent at that pays the bills and keeps you alive and gives you enough free time to work on what you actually want to do

traditional boomer advice was to pick something you love, but after putting in endless hours of doing it over and over just to make enough to keep you fed and provide a place to sleep, you will grow to resent it with a passion – for your own mental health, you absolutely must maintain a separation between the job and your personal life

That's the neat part, you dont. I'm in my mid 30s and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

You want the job that is offered to you, pays good, and won't feel like hell every day. This job may or may not be related to your field of study, but you better study something useful if you want to be taken seriously.

Stop thinking that you can pick and choose, sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. Some people can, most people can't.

This is a major failing of the school system.

The best I can recommend is that you try out jobs now -- but maybe skip anything 'fake' like online courses unless you think they prepare you for what's in the next sentence. Go find people professionally doing a thing you might like, and try to work with them, somehow. Internships, volunteer work, organizing events, etc. File paperwork and make coffee, if that means you get to see the work actually being done.

Barring that, do the thing yourself if possible. Publish the results. All code goes on public repositories, all stories should be submitted to magazines or literature groups. All songs written must be sung in public. Get certified for CPR and first aid if considering medicine, and volunteer using it. Get an amateur radio license and build a radio. Look at jobs on a freelancing platform, and just do them on your own to build a portfolio (maybe actually apply for the jobs, once you have a portfolio). Not every type of job can be tried out this way, but many can.

You're going to get rejected a lot, you can't just show up with a resume and demand a job (people who claim this works are weird). People who create and do nothing will mock you sometimes. A lot of jobs want young people 'out of sight and in school' too. However, this kind of disappointment happens to all of us at some point anyway, so may as well get it over with.

If you're lucky, you've got a few years between the age of say 14 and 19 where you're not expected to support yourself financially but your brain works as well as it's ever going to. While it's useful to get good grades while you're in school (although they are useless afterward), I think it's a mistake to focus on that at the expense of actually trying to do things. A college degree is too big of an investment of time and money to go into blind.

If you're in a situation where you do have to support yourself or your family before finishing school, then the necessities of life obviously take precedent. I won't pretend I have a good solution to that difficult situation.

Don't be so hung up on getting a job you hate. The secret they don't tell you is that pretty well everyone hates their job. Get out and pursue things that seem interesting to you, and don't be afraid that you won't be good enough, that was my big downfall when I was younger. Since then I've held many wildly different jobs.

I started pursuing IT since I love computers, but ended up hating being an on-call computer janitor. I did fire surpression, then IT sales (hated that too), then randomly got a job on the railroad. After bouncing around the railroad I have now ended up as Jack of all trades master of none handyman that does maintenance for a nonprofit, and I love it.

I was more surprised than anyone to find out that I preferred working with my hands, and working outdoors. I had always dreamed of a cushy job with a nice office where I could wear fancy shoes. But now I'm a nerd for workboots who absolutely does not thrive in an office environment.

But essentially I'm saying try not to sweat it. It may take you a long time to settle into something you like. Don't be afraid to go outside your comfort zone because you just might like it.

You need to figure out:

• What you like
• What you’re good at (or can become good at with training/a degree)
• What people will pay you to do

If you like something, you’re good at it, and people will pay you to do it, that’s a career. Stick with it your entire life.

If you’re good at something and people will pay you to do it but you don’t like it, that’s a job. Work it to pay the bills, but don’t be afraid to jump ship as soon as something better comes along.

If you like something and are good at it but no one will pay you to do it, that’s a hobby. You’ll need to supplement that with a job to get by.

If you like something and people will pay you for it but you’re not good at it, fake it ‘till you make it, my friend.

I agree with many of the comments about just choosing a direction and trying out a lot of things - that is absolutely what you should do at first.

However, I disagree with many on the part about just finding something that pays the bills and finances your hobbies. You're going to do your job for 40 hours a week for almost your whole life. There is nothing you'll spend more time doing than your job.

I've found a job that I love and it makes life much more enjoyable. While my job doesn't have an exact US equivalent, the best way to describe it is that I work as a teaching assistant during the school day and as a teacher at after-school. Sure, I still hate getting up on Mondays (and the rest of the days too, honestly), dealing with difficult parents and idiot bosses and all the other annoying shit that comes with any job, but all in all I love it and I'd gladly keep working 20-30 hours a week there for free if I won the lottery tomorrow. I could make hundreds or even a thousand dollars more every month if I took say a factory job, but it's still worth it because I genuinely have fun doing my job.

Try to find something that you really like and still pays the bills. It's worth it.

If you decide to go to college, you have a couple years of general ed classes to get out of the way. Pick a wide variety of things you are interested in. If one clicks maybe it’s the career for you.

Nobody gets out of high school and gets the job they want when they grow up. ;)

Your first job is going to suck. It's going to be hard work. The pay and hours are not going to be great. You won't be respected as an employee or often as a human being.

What it's going to teach you are organizational skills. Show up on time. Do the best job you can do. Admit your mistakes and learn from them.

Carry what you learn there to the next job and the next job. Do better each time. Learn new skills. Find jobs that interest you.

If you can, go to college for a STEM degree, network with other people and employers, and when you get out of college, you can do what you want.

If college isn't for you, find a trade you're good at and enroll in trade school. Plumbers, electrictians, HVAC techs, mechanics are never out of work.

Avoid: Retail work. Restaurant work. It will break you. Fine for when you're in school, not if you're out of school.

Lots of stumbling. Thinking I liked something, learning things in life, try other things. Eventually I found something that I really liked.

I always liked computers, so I got an entry level job in IT.

Just followed my passion tbh.

do quacks quack?

There is no such thing anymore as a job for life anymore that ended in the 80s. I don't honestly think that's there's a career for life anymore either, that ended in the early years of this century.

Asking someone to choose something to do for 50 years (if they're lucky) at 16 or 18 is folly.

Build yourself a portfolio of skills which you are proficient in and enjoy doing. I would include (1) languages in that and (2) the technique of communication over and above any technical skills you possess.

I say languages because a second language awakens a different mode of thought, maybe not too much if the languages are closely related.

I'm Gen X and was probably never conventionally employable. Company Roles I've had seemed to seek me rather than me them. I wish I had been much more aggressive about a second language much earlier on.

It's not the language itself. It seems to assist in fluidity of communication. I'm not sure that I can explain what I mean by that: the structure of French sentences differs wildly from English sentences sometimes, but about 30% of English words are French in origin. It seems to encourage me to thing about how I am conveying my idea in words without me being cognisance of that happening.

Trades are a good option if you like figuring things out and if owning your own business sounds good to you. There's tradeoffs to that, but we're always going to need more welders, plumbers, HVAC, electricians.

Do a bunch of low-commitment jobs. Don’t commit to a 10+ year path on something you haven’t experienced.

Volunteer and work a bunch of nothing jobs. Get a sense of what works for you and what doesn’t.

Then when you’ve experienced a few things with throwaway jobs, come back to the question of what you want to invest serious time into.

My advice is just pick a broad direction and try to optimize for not limiting your options.

When I was 18 I liked math and science so I went to school for engineering. Did I want to be an engineer? I had no idea at the time. But I figured the first couple years were mostly math and science courses anyway so if something else caught my attention (computer science, chemistry, etc) I could narrow my focus when the time came.

If you don't plan to go to college, that's cool too. My advice in that case would still be not to limit yourself. Pick something in your broad interest area that challenges you and has a clear path of advancement (certifications, etc). If you don't like it after a few years find something else. Just make sure with whatever you pick the growth path is pretty clear and at least somewhat in your control.

There's a lot of advice here to work for money and that it's a fool's errand to "follow your dreams". This is the same advice I got twenty years ago when I was 18. I followed it. That path led to money but I'm not sure it precisely led to a life of fulfillment or contentment. I often wish I'd spent more of my early twenties taking more risks and chasing more dreams. You're only young once, and age accumulates life baggage (e.g., bills , mortgage , life partner, maybe kids) that discourages risk taking. Don't forget to take a risk every now and then, you might end up surprising yourself.

Try to find out as much as you can about what the job/career is actually like, ask people who are in that field, if you can try to get some experience as an intern.

The worst thing you can do is focus on a major without considering what the actual work will be like once you graduate. Even if you love studying a topic, the actual work may be much less fun in practice.

Try to get some part-time experience of your own as you can, even at sub-entry level/intern levels it should help you know better what kinds of jobs you would enjoy full time. It’s often hard to envision a job without having some exposure to the field.

Honestly this is one of the major failures of how schooling works currently. Because everything is so generalized, people fresh out of HS have very little value to any real job. They also have very little understanding of how real jobs work.

Most people just end up taking a job because they know someone that helps them. They end up in whatever industry that is and go from there. It don't have a lot to do about what you "want" to do with your life and more about the necessity of having money to survive.

Actually that is the biggest question I ask myself. I'm almost done with my master but I'm not sure if I wanna become a teacher anymore. After graduating I will try some different jobs and see how I feel about it. I think it's important that you have some kind of fun / fulfillment at work, otherwise I couldn't bare doing it (maybe a ADHD kinda stuff). If you can don't be afraid of exploring your options and look into jobs that aren't related to your education. I wish you the best of luck finding your way in life. Important is that you are happy and doing it for yourself imho.

I’ll let you know when I figure it out

That’s the neat part: you don’t.

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.

I'm 29 and I still don't know.

This is not a valid question. You should be looking for a direction, not specifcs. Career is a combination if what you want to do, what you are willing to do, and what the job market needs right now. If you focus on a dream job you can get stuck with no job as the market doesn't need that.

What if I offered you a job but you had to move go the most remote Africa? Some would jump at it, others would hate it. Would you work a job where you are on the phone all day? Would you work a job in software testing? Would you be happy as a tour guide? Different people have different answers. You are allowed to change your mind later.

There is also what you are willing to go through for money. Doctors make a lot of money, but often have to work long hours and can be on call in the middle of the night, not to mention med school is hard. The world needs more engineers, but again it needs a lot of school .

So pick a direction that sounds good. Then refine it based on both what you like and what opportunities open up.

College is a great place to start. Unfortunately college is ridiculously expensive these days, but community college is still pretty affordable. There are so many things you don't even know exist in the world right after highschool. The world also works a lot differently than you've seen so far, so a college level education is really beneficial. Go to community college, knock out some Gen Ed courses, and take some interesting classes for your electives. You'll learn about stuff that you didn't know existed and you may find that you're passionate about some of those things.

Before you get married and have kids, just do a bunch of shit. Fail a lot, figure out what you like and what you don’t.

I had like 30 jobs between 17 and 23. I was a roofer for a couple days at one point (I do project management now, as a comparison).

Just try stuff and take advantage of the fact that you’re young and you can say “I’m figuring things out”. It’s a lot harder to make that fly when you’re 30.

This is certainly not an easy task! Hell, I am 46 years old and still figuring out life. 🤣 In all seriousness though, you will probably change careers 2-3x in your life or more. Maybe just figure out something that you could see yourself doing for the next 5-10 years and have a go at it? That would be my recommendation. Choose a career that will at least pay you enough so that you can live with a bit of comfort.

I always liked the idea of going to a college that had a program with a work term so you can see if you like it and also get some experience. I would say talk to some people in areas that you are interested in and see if you find any jobs you may look doing.

It's not wrong to start with whatever / at random. Once you gain some experience you can decide whether to pursue or try something else.

For me it came naturally from my interests and learned capabilities.

You can ask about and try out different jobs to get a bit of insight and more data points for making a decision. Even if you won't have a definite favorite you may find things you consider undesired or desirable for you.

Don't worry too much about getting 'locked in' to a job, you can always do a career change, it's a lot easier than you think.

Try stuff out! I ended up in a career very different than my major because I volunteered at an organization and ended up really enjoying what I did there.

I think community college is actually great for this because changing your major/exploring new coursework or opportunities is much cheaper than doing so at a regular college/University.

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.

I never did. Not everyone has to have a "meaningful career". I realised I don't really care what my job is, as long as it pays enough to fund my mountain of hobbies.

Work is important, but is probably the least important thing around you. Your friends, your family. Now those are hard to find more of if you run out.