| I think the thing that concerns me most about the authors post is the implicit assumption that selling ones labor to a company and being managed, coddled and generally told what to do and how to do it is the only way to make money. It seems like the author has never thought of creating their own job. It's pretty humbling to walk around the neighborhood offering to cut lawns or paint fences and building up business that way but sometimes it needs to be done. The author must have _some_ skill worth selling after all those years of schooling. Even if they make less than minimum wage initially they can do something. The fact that the author isn't running their own business isn't what concerns me, it's that it's something that doesn't seem to have even been considered. To me, this seems like a societal problem as well as one for the author. In terms of advice, I can only offer my own experience: I quit my first job at 18 (worked full time through college) to work for less than minimum wage at an ISP because I valued experience. I moved. Twice. First to London, then to the US. If you are in a town where you have seriously gone after all the jobs you can and still can't get anywhere, it's time to look at places that ARE hiring and move there. I was willing to make atrociously bad amounts of money (I was living in a country with no minimum wage law) for five years in order to get the experience and proof of ability to execute that I needed to move and get a "real" job. In my mind, the 29 year old author's only real hope is to create their own job - they have nothing to show an employer that they have any kind of tenacity or desire to work in a specific industry and so they will need to get their experience elsewhere. This sucks for the author. I get that but I see no other feasible way for them to explain why they are 29 with no relevant work experience in their field. More generally, this sucks for society - we seem to have convinced a large amount of the population that the only way to make money is to sell ones labor to someone else and have that person tell you what to do and how to do it. In short: there is a dearth of autonomy in the world. |