27 and still no real career prospects. What to do?

[AureliusMaximus]

don't have much confidence that I would be able to be a good employee.

If you know that then the path for you is to be your own like your family before you and start your own company.

You say you have a passion for languages so start your own translation service company. Since you have relatives that already have done this and ran company succefully you also have the luck of having a sort of already established network of persons around you that you can ask for business advice if needed which is huge advance. Most of us are not that lucky...

It's very good money in that sector and the pricing rates for professional translations is very high.

I know this because I myself was researching the translation market for a task to translate my own company's website to several languages. The price quotes was very high to say the least.

The point is that you can make very good money out of your language skills... and make a very good life out of it.

Bonus is that it doesn't require much capital to start up. You need a laptop/stationary computer, phone website and leads to call /contact to find new customers to offer you services to and laods of grit of course.

Anyway. Good luck with whatever your choosing will be brother.

 

[Gamisch]

I'm gonna get career counseling. I found an ADHD specific one near me

Another weak excuse.

I've also been diagnosed with ADHD , and even more stuff i wont even toich upon right now..but geuss what...I use it to my ADVANTAGE..i am,( and ALWAYS have been!!) a non stop battery full of energy. I can and will work up to 8 to 12 hours a day easily once i set my mind on something..

Even when i was depressed I was always busy refining whatever skill I was mastering. Ofcourse I'm a musician too..I have spend countless hours on learning how to write ,record, mix and master music, video's, artwork ,photoshops DAWs, Adobe premiere pro ect ,apart from learning how to play keys ,pop songs and classical music like Bach Beethoven, Chopin ect.

I am also a graduated music teacher although i never really did anything with my papers.

Almost fell of the cliff permanently due to drugs and alcohol. Lost every one close to me..Everyone gave up on me( rightfully so) But NOPE!!!!!!! GAMISCH CANT AND WONT EVER BE STOPPED!!!!

Now I'm a commercial painter. Back to square fecking one ,minimum wage. But hey, I can work my azz off and finish it off with my "sense for art"by producing something nice for the eyes to look at. Best of both worlds. My boss ,LOVES me ( woman ofcourse) and is investing heavily in me...I am her soldier on the job!!

Stop making excuses. You sound pathetic (as useal). You have a rich azz family to support your sorry azz. I swear i would slap the F out of you( with love) of I'd ever met you....grrrrraaawwwwwh you are annoying!!

 

[MatureDJ]

Like the title says I'm 27 years old and I've never really had any semblance of a career, or even a reliable source of income from a job for that matter. I never had a job as a teenager or in college, and the most consistent money I ever made in my life came during the summer of '14 when I worked for my mom's boyfriend's construction company in the last two months before college started. Currently I get the money I need to live from a combination of the money my family made when we sold the newspaper and TV station we owned, as well as the trust fund my grandfather set up for me when I was really young. My family isn't crazy rich in the grand scheme of things, we're like one tier above upper middle class if that makes sense. I guess you could call it "lower upper class". The fact that I have at least some money is all well and good but I'd love to have an additional source of income to put me in the black and not burn thru the money I have already so much, and also to never really have had a job at this age is pretty unbecoming anyway. It's also of note that I'm not blowing all my trust/corporate sale money all at once. I live a fairly modest life in all actuality, despite coming from a relatively upper class background. I don't spend that much money on living expenses like groceries and I live by myself in a small apartment in a decent suburb of the city I've lived in for most of my life. I graduated college in late 2019 and since then I haven't really done very much with my life. My weekly routine revolves around going to the gym, attending religious lectures, and practicing or recording with my band.

The major I picked in college (German) was pretty useless in hindsight. One good thing tho is that I have no student debt since the trust payed for my college. After I graduated I dabbled in doing freelance translation work on the internet translating documents from German to English, but I only ever made like 20 dollars doing that. I've always had a knack for languages and I've known German for my entire life, and I have a pretty academic knowledge of the languages I know, so sometimes friends or family have suggested I go to grad school to study linguistics or something. However my undergrad GPA isn't good enough for me to get in and even if that wasn't so I still wouldn't do it since it would very likely be a waste of time. I have decent knowledge of a couple classical languages like Sanskrit and Latin but this is just a parlour trick and useless in the grand scheme of things.

Technically the closest thing I have to meaningful work experience is the recording and touring experience I have as a musician. Bass is my main instrument and I also play guitar and sitar. I've played in the same band for nine years. In this time we've released five studio albums with a sixth in the works and gone on tour twice, one of which was a national tour. However, the albums don't sell that well and the tours weren't exactly glamourous. It just consisted of three weeks of touring the midwest, mountain west, and west coast playing at small clubs for little money and sleeping in our van in walmart parking lots. My band has never been lucrative and there's only been a few times we've made decent money from playing shows. There's been a couple times where we've played shows and made a few hundred dollars from it but these instances have been rare. It's safe to say I'll never be making enough money thru music to pay the rent. Last year I applied for a job at a guitar store near my house, and they interviewed me and it seemed to have gone pretty well. However, when they called me back they informed me they had a "hiring freeze" and thus couldn't give me the job. In the past few months tho I've seen new faces working there so I'm pretty sure they just didn't want to hire me and let me down gently. I would have much preferred it if they would have just outright told me I didn't have the job.

A more distant relative of mine owns a small music venue in town and has said a few times that I should come work there. The job is there if I want it but it's not ideal and would only be a short term solution. I don't really want to work there since the hours would suck and it would mostly consist of mundane work like moving amplifiers and other equipment on and off the stage. I'd be coming home from work at like 3 AM every time with that job and that would suck too. There's a couple other guitar stores I could maybe apply to but I'm worried my lack of work experience will be my undoing, despite the fact that I'm an experienced musician with very good knowledge of instruments and music equipment. Furthermore I have ADHD so I really doubt I'd be able to hold a retail job for long before getting fired. I've always had a huge problem with being late to things and my condition also causes me to make stupid trivial mistakes on a regular basis. I don't have much confidence that I would be able to be a good employee. I'd probably get fired eventually for being late too many times or making a dumb mistake.

In short I really don't know what to do here. There's things in my life that I'm good at and passionate about, but nothing that translates into being a viable source of income. I'm a good musician but rock n roll will never pay the rent. I know a few languages but there's not much demand for translation from German to English and the classical languages I know are even more useless. I'm intelligent, articulate, and reasonably well educated but I have ADHD and because of it I would be a poor employee bound to eventually be fired from job I would get in the off chance that someone would even hire me in the first place. I can't go back to school since my GPA in undergrad wasn't high enough and it would be a waste of time anyway. The fact that I have a trust fund makes me less motivated to look for work since I'm not under any direct threat of not having enough money to pay for living expenses. Overall it doesn't seem like I have any good options as far as career, or even temporary employment. So what am I to actually do?

I'd recommend learning Spanish and going to Latin America as an English teacher; I would have recommended learning Russian, but that possibility literally got shot to h3ll . Also buy a small, very inexpensive home in some small town within 1-1/2 hours of your city; most cities have these towns, and you could get cozy renovated home for less than $100K (you should wait until prices really start falling due to the high interest rates, and having a mortgage with a high interest rate can easily be refinanced when the interest rates go down, which they will again). Or maybe you spend a little more money and not be so far out, etc. Keep your nominal income low so that you can get a low-cost health-insurance policy from the ACA.

Being a teacher will give you agency and not make yourself feel like you're a loser. And since you have construction experience, you could look into being a flooring installer or some other building-trade, and hang out your shingle for work - if the work is sparse, it's not so bad since you have the Trust - and you could pick up that work whenever you're at home away from GeoMaxxing in Latin America.

There are a lot of folks that are almost in your shoes, but without the backstop of a Trust. They need to toil at a thoroughly alienating job (which at least these days is not at rock-bottom wages). Most folks in Generation-Z who get economic stability will do so by being inheritors (or helped out by ancestors while they are still around). Already, college graduates are in oversupply, and they will only keep their employability by being more suck-up, corporate-drone woke then their employee competitors - an extraordinarily alienating lot in life. And while the trades are seeing a rebirth in fortunes, that will eventually work its way out (although it will be able to still get some money from working).

 

[MatureDJ]

I don't know much about ecommerce but maybe I should learn a bit about it

Don't waste your time. Very low margin work.

 

[MatureDJ]

Hey, you could go into web, software developer work

Pick two programming languages such as java and JavaScript, learn it

Then study some databases, version control, tdd, Oop

You can then create your own projects, submit this on GitHub and then apply for development roles

The OP doesn't sound like the analytical type, so I didn't recommend that. But yes, with the backstop of his Trust, he could devote a lot of time to doing projects so as to derive work from it. That said, a problem with programming work is that it requires a lot of ephemeral knowledge that goes out of scope (pun intended) once everyone moves to the new k3wl thing. And becoming proficient in database or data mining, etc. pretty much requires a Comp Sci degree to master the concepts - or at least to prove to an employer that the concepts have been mastered.

 

[BergischerLöwe]

I'd recommend learning Spanish and going to Latin America as an English teacher; I would have recommended learning Russian, but that possibility literally got shot to h3ll . Also buy a small, very inexpensive home in some small town within 1-1/2 hours of your city; most cities have these towns, and you could get cozy renovated home for less than $100K (you should wait until prices really start falling due to the high interest rates, and having a mortgage with a high interest rate can easily be refinanced when the interest rates go down, which they will again). Or maybe you spend a little more money and not be so far out, etc. Keep your nominal income low so that you can get a low-cost health-insurance policy from the ACA.

Being a teacher will give you agency and not make yourself feel like you're a loser. And since you have construction experience, you could look into being a flooring installer or some other building-trade, and hang out your shingle for work - if the work is sparse, it's not so bad since you have the Trust - and you could pick up that work whenever you're at home away from GeoMaxxing in Latin America.

There are a lot of folks that are almost in your shoes, but without the backstop of a Trust. They need to toil at a thoroughly alienating job (which at least these days is not at rock-bottom wages). Most folks in Generation-Z who get economic stability will do so by being inheritors (or helped out by ancestors while they are still around). Already, college graduates are in oversupply, and they will only keep their employability by being more suck-up, corporate-drone woke then their employee competitors - an extraordinarily alienating lot in life. And while the trades are seeing a rebirth in fortunes, that will eventually work its way out (although it will be able to still get some money from working).

I've thought about teaching english in Europe somewhere in the German speaking world since I know German already, have a strong understanding of how languages work, and have experience translating documents from German to English so I understand the differences between those two languages. However there would be a lot working against me if I did that. I have ADHD and my puncuality and organization has always been pretty bad because of it. Teachers have to be organized, punctual, and personable, and these are three qualities that I'm quite lacking in. An ideal job for me would probably be something where I don't have to be very organized and where I don't have to deal with other people very much

 

[MtmVaott]

How are things going for you? Did you have career counseling?

 

[BergischerLöwe]

How are things going for you? Did you have career counseling?

Not quite yet, still working on the backlog I have with getting other pertinent things done. Like getting health insurance for example, havent had any in the past few years