EMPLOYMENT
Borrow a shitload of money I won’t ever be able to pay back to listen to a bunch of people who have only a vague idea of what they’re talking about blabber at me for years. Then go grovel for an opportunity to be abused by a sadistic asshat and get paid for it, but not enough to afford a working car or an apartment to yourself. Who the fuck wants to do that?
My first impulse was to say “Nobody in their right mind,” but I’ve lived long enough to meet a fair number of crazy people and none of them want to do it either. I can employ a shovel to dig my own grave; the word literally means “use”. Who wants to dedicate their life to being used?
We all need occupation; sitting around staring at the dirt gets boring very quickly. How about we occupy ourselves doing interesting things that make the world a better place to live? We’ve got a lot of those. Oh, we also need to figure out some way to generate enough resources to live comfortably, maybe even afford to raise a family. How do we do that?
In the long term, we enact an unconditional universal guaranteed income (UUGI), funded by taxes on business income. Great idea, but not this week. What do we do while we’re working on getting that done?
Pick an interesting thing to do, that leads in the general direction of making our surroundings better places for humans to live. Tell me what it is. I’ve spent a few decades getting paid to manage projects and programs, I can help you learn how to write a proposal for your Interesting Thing that we can get funded. We’ve already got a file of a couple of dozen such projects; you’re welcome to look through those and see if anything strikes your fancy. Or don’t and make one up by yourself; that might be more fun.
The part of managing programs I enjoy most is finding a bunch of projects that have synergistic results (each project makes some of the other projects work better), and then writing proposals for doing them all at once – which is what a program is. You write a project plan for the thing you want to occupy yourself with, I’ll build a program with it, and we’ll go out and look for funding. I bet we’ll get it – I’ve done this before and I’m good at it.
I don’t have money to pay you for writing your proposal – but once we do have funding, the most obvious person to hire to manage the new project is the person who wrote the proposal for it. So you get to skip the first half-a-dozen steps on the career ladder for the profession your expensive schooling might not have gotten you into in the first place. And then you can work with me on setting up that UUGI program, so you being able to make a living is no longer tied to having to work for sadistic asshats.