Answer for question 4497.

[sabotabby]

[Error: unknown template qotd]Do what you love and follow your dreams because either way, you're going to be mostly unemployed, and it's cheaper and also less disappointing to be an unemployed artist than an unemployed engineer. There are no jobs for anyone. Welcome to the grimdark post-work future where the majority of you will not quite earn a living in an informal, unstable economy rooting through garbage dumps for scrap metal.

Unless you can luck into a trades apprenticeship, in which case, do that. They haven't quite found a way to replace plumbers yet.

You can guess by my cynicism that I chose what, at the time, was a practical major in university guaranteed to net me a good stable job, just as the dot com bubble burst and left my entire graduating class scrambling for scraps.

(I think this is why they didn't let me give the valedictorian speech in high school.)

Comments

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I have a good degree from Cambridge University and two master's degrees but have never had a job. I am weird, though. I grew up in socialist-anarchist hippie world in squats and housing co ops and jobs/careers were certainly never anything any decent person was allowed to aspire to. They were bourgeois things that baddies did. Everyone we knew was either on benefits or a special needs teacher. I didn't expect to live beyond my degree anyway - had planned to kill myself afterwards - so never planned ahead that far. And back then it was assumed that if you went to Oxbridge you walked into a top diplomatic or government position anyway, so school teachers didn't bother with career advice apart from a series of monthly talks from people like Winston Churchill's granddaughter, Lady Soames, about how her grandad liked painting watercolours, and sometimes a female barrister would give a boring talk about how women could be barristers if they went to Oxbridge.

[sabotabby]

I have just never lived in circumstances where you can not have a job. By the time I was a young adult, benefits were pretty much non-existent. It's work or die.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Yes, I would definitely be dead were it not for benefits, which are now being taken away, as I have never been in a situation where I would have been able to work... there must be a lot of people dying in Canada. It is horrifying.