While I moved out of the house and got married at 22, I didn’t have a half-way decent job until I was 28. I didn’t graduate college until I was 35, and didn’t own my first home until I was 37. And I’m pretty well off right now at 48. You have plenty of time. I do think you should get a room mate, and get out of the house ASAP. Given that you mentioned that, I don’t think you’re proud of it and perhaps it would give you a bump in self-esteem.
WHAT??? You’re Atomic Shrimp??? I’ve been watching your channel for years!! I don’t know if I’m the only one who doesn’t already know this but you just blew my mind :eek:
I had a lot of existential angst in my 20s. I think it’s an important part of life; you’re going to go through it eventually, and it’s much cuter when you’re pushing 30 than when you’re middle-aged. I spent 10 years working in restaurants and trying out other jobs before moving back in with my folks to go back to school at almost 30. It mostly sucked. But now I have a career that really suits me, and I’m not only proud of where I ended up, I’m happy to have spent that time exploring and failing. I think it makes me a wiser, more interesting, and more empathetic person.
My husband, on the other hand, did everything “right.” He did well in high school and got into a good college, did well in college and got into a good law school, did well in law school and got a good job and an awesome wife. 
Other than the wife part, though, he regrets everything. He quit his job six months ago with nothing else lined up because he was so miserable he could barely get out of bed. (Yes, he was in treatment, but it turns out quitting was both necessary and sufficient on its own to treat his depression.) He’s been applying for other legal jobs but is also thinking about going back to school and starting over in a completely different field. I’m doing my best to be supportive, but I sure wish he’d gotten this whole misery out of the way earlier.
It takes time to figure out what you really want out of life, and the time you spend blindly doing what you think you’re supposed to do just postpones the inevitable day of reckoning. IMO, OP, you’re precisely on track, doing the hard work of introspection you should be doing right now. If you feel like sharing more detail, people here may be able to give you more specific advice, but this is gonna be a slog no matter what. I wish you luck.
You still have plenty of time. I was in grad school until I was almost 29. That was 40 years ago.
Think about it this way. The past is the past - doing something else might have come out better, or it might have come out worse. But try to make sure any decision or lack of decision you make today is not something you’ll regret in 10 years.
That be me! Thanks so much for your interest in my work!
This.
What if you’d slaved over your grades and pushed hard and made a million dollars by age 25…only to realized that along the way you’d lost your true love through neglect?
What if you chose to stay in your small home town and pursue work that didn’t pay well but which you enjoyed, only now you realize you can’t afford much of a retirement at all?
What if you’d pursued a career as a rock musician and had success, but never had a family of your own because you were always on the road?
Plus I think a lot of people look back at situations through rose-colored glasses and forget some of the difficulties the other paths presented. Bill Gates apparently said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” A lot of things are still possible.
You are still a baby.
I’ve found that the more physically fit you are, the less you feel like time is running out.
42 years old here, and my life has been a series of reminders that it’s never too late.
I graduated from college and entered law school at 22, but by 25 I was a dropout living at home and working a retail job. “I fucked up - I should have been a lawyer”, I lamented. My mom, though, said, “It’s not too late”. She was right, and a year later I had returned to school and finished my degree.
I failed the bar exam the first time. Graduating “late”, making a pittance as a legal assistant, trying to study at night - clearly, I was “too late” for my career. Except, I passed with no issues the 2nd time, and was working as an associate attorney - just like I’d aspired to - before I was 30.
Except I wasn’t in a good job, or on a great career track. By my mid-30s, I had bounced around for a few jobs, and the law firm I had opened was barely getting by. What to do? Sell the house and move to Colorado! Of course, I didn’t have a job in Colorado; I didn’t even yet have a law license in the state. On my 38th birthday, I spent my morning walking my dogs in the park instead of working, because I was unemployed. “What am I doing?” I worried.
Except I was soon to get a job practicing criminal defense for one of the most prominent attorneys in my state. I had finally found an area of law I loved and was finally exposed to case that were interesting and exciting, and which could put my particular skills to good use. Sure, I was 40, but I had made it.
Except…
I’m soon to start another job. In another state. Because my boss didn’t turn out to be the right fit. I’ll be taking a particularly big pay cut, but I still think it’s the right move, for interminable reasons, the most important of which is that I still don’t think it’s too late to get it right.
If being close to 30 and not having figured things out is “too late”, then I’m doomed. But, dammit, I refuse to be doomed. So, OP, neither are you. Just typically frustrated. Time to take a big leap of faith - somewhere, in some direction!
Mangetout, just looked at your youtube channel. Cool interesting stuff. Have you ever heard of Rob Cockerham? He’s a friend of mine in California. He does similar stuff that you do. He has a website: cockeyed.com along with a youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/robcockerham/videos
Not to get off track, but no matter how good your grades are, I think there are very few jobs that would enable you to become a millionaire at 25. Maybe if you are EXTREMELY lucky, you joint a startup that gave you equity and it had a kick-ass public offering or did extraordinarily well as a trader for some investment bank.
I only mention this because this kind of “millionaire at age 25” thinking seems to be common among the younger generations (like the OP). I will even paraphrase from a video by Gary Vaynerchuk (who I usually find insufferable). He’s giving this young girl advice and she says something like she’ll take his advice and be a millionaire at age 25. Gary basically explains that there is ZERO possibility for her to go from nothing to millionaire in 2-3 years. His advice (which is also applicable to the OP) is to find what she loves to do and expect to grind it out 10, 15+ years and then MAYBE she might turn it into a million dollar business.
Seriously, everyone thinks they are going to be Mark Zuckerberg.
I think you’re right.
Recently I had a thought cross my mind. Did I want to be the type of guy who never went for what he wanted and then died regretting not going for it? Like I know my parents said accounting is a “Safe” field to enter, but taking the classes showed me how much I hated the damn thing. “Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?” I thought. I was not amused at the prospect of spending 20+ years in an office job to, as Alan Watts put it: “Doing that I don’t like to go on living to go on to do things I don’t like”. I don’t want to “wait for the weekend” for freedom. I want to at least go for it and if I make it great and if not at least I can say I went for it with no regrets.
Two things. First, a proverb I read years ago and that I think about all the time:
No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back.
It’s scary as hell, because abandoning a direction you’ve committed to feels like an enormous waste, and sometimes a betrayal. But it’s also liberating, because you don’t need to tie yourself to your shitty decisions just because you made them. If you’re going down the wrong road, turn back. It’s not too late.
The other is a quote by Mary Schmich and not Kurt Vonnegut:
True enough. I picked the numbers kind of randomly but for a lot of people the quantifiable is alluring. If my net worth isn’t $X by age Z years, I will have failed.
But you know, if money is a person’s measure of success I’m not here to question that per se. If that’s what makes someone happy, they should aim for that goal.
Every year I plant lots of seed of perennial plants; shrubs and trees for the most part.
I know that I will not live long enough to see many of them in their maturity.
But the process is the living, not the final results.
I am turning 77 tomorrow.
At 30, I had just gotten out of the Air Force, leaving a good career with good pay. I was married with a toddler, but left the service to become a teacher…and there were few teaching jobs available. But I prevailed, got a job (along with a substantial income reduction), and discovered that teaching was a wonderful choice. Stayed with that for the next 30 years and retired. Now I am busy developing new varieties of plants.
Call me an optimist if you will, but I made choices that worked out for me. Don’t be afraid to open a new door. You can only go forward in time, and live life on your terms rather than some artificial barrier that you have erected for yourself.
The Thoreau line, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation” really resonated with me. As far as I know, you only get one life, and I hate the thought of wasting it in misery.
Sometimes, the exhilaration and excitement of making a large, fundamental change (move to a new city or finding a new place to live, getting into or out of a relationship, starting a new job or career, et al) is evidence that this new thing is a good idea.
And here’s the thing - life rarely goes according to plan. So when you make a choice to take some big change in pursuit of your dreams, you are likely to find your life ending up vastly different than you originally predicted. Routinely, though, people report that these unexpected consequences are the best parts of their life, the things they cherish the most when they look back.
concerning what other people think/need :
my advice is at some point you gotta be a selfish bastard and do something for you no matter who it upsets or pisses off … I spent most of my life choices it on other peoples wants and feelings and not getting out of situations that I needed to when it led me to get taken advantage of
Agreed. Also, whilst some people have a clear vision for what they want to do with their lives, and some of those people have the drive to pursue it relentlessly, and some of those succeed, it’s pretty silly to think that everyone can or should be like that.
Furthermore, the false notion that you need to be like that prevents many people from getting started on anything. If you wait for your moment of epiphany, you might be waiting forever.
Time wasted exploring the wrong avenues is better than time wasted doing nothing - because at the very least, you get to eliminate possibilities. Doing something is often better than doing nothing.
Dude, you’ve got all the time in the world.
I’ll tell you a secret: for many of us, the 20s are the suckiest decade of our lives. You couldn’t pay me enough money to relive that decade.
Why? Because while many people come out of college knowing exactly what they want to do, and start doing it, many of the rest of us finish our schooling with no clue of what we might want to do next, and no idea how to figure it out. Many of us have lives kinda like this:
Other than the marriage part, that sounds awfully familiar! Dead-end jobs in my 20s, went back to grad school at 29 and again at 34, didn’t marry until 37, started the career for real that I thought was going to be my real career at 39, found out it wasn’t, finally fell into the right place, career-wise, at 44, and even then didn’t feel I was really hitting my stride until I was maybe 53. Didn’t become a parent until I was 55. Yeah, it took that long for all the pieces of my life to finally, finally fall together.
But I’m 66 now, and the past eleven years have been the best eleven years of my life.
This. Even if your life is going nowhere, learning to survive on your own is important. And doing that would probably make you feel more capable.
This, a thousand times over! Don’t be afraid to make mistakes in life. First of all, most of us do - you go through this crazy ride only once, and you don’t know fuck-all about what to do with it when you start.
But you learn nothing more about yourself, what you really want, and what sort of career might work for you, by trying nothing. You do something new, and you can see what parts of the new job really made it worth coming in, and what aspects of it made you wish you could just stay in bed. Also, trying different things gets you exposed to a wider variety of jobs that other people are doing that you’re interacting with.
Get out there. Try stuff. Fall on your face a few times, it’s OK to do that. But 28, 29 years old? You’ve got all the time in the world. You’ve got plenty of time to figure it all out, as long as you push yourself out the door and get started.
At 60, a slowing body and progressing blindness led me to stop traveling. and I became a contented sloth. But at 75, I needed a new passport, I discovered cheap online plane fares, and I started using a white cane, which felt liberating. So I thought what the hell, and booked a ticket to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. That reopened the flood gates, and in three years, I went to 30 countries, all continents, around the world twice. All by myself, nothing planned except flight itineraries.
So, even at 75, it’s not too late to late to chip away at a bucket list.
Yup, also, making mistakes is an interesting excursion all of itself, into discovery of possibilities you couldn’t have imagined or planned if you tried.