Not following traditional career path?

>>18338178
>Normally during this time in an American's life, people have already finished their master's degree and moving on to starting a family and perhaps a business or a new job.
Uh, I'm pretty sure that this isn't the typical American life. You say that like everyone has a masters degree, which is simply not true

Actually, that seems to be the root of your problem: you are very misguided about what you should be doing and what you should have achieved by now.

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>>18338183
Most of my friends have at the least gotten their degrees and are in their respective industries now at my age. I feel left out when they ask me

>hey anon so we're here
>where are you at now?

I feel late to a party I wasn't invited, which never happened to begin with.

>>18338188
The thing is, now, more than ever, there is no set timeline you have to follow. Just because they're doing one thing, doesn't mean that you have to follow the same timeline.

And in the end, there's not much you can do about things that have already happened. Crying about how you've lost time isn't going to let you go back and start over. You are where you are, and all you can do is move forward.

>>18338178
Sup anon. I was in the same boat as you about seven years ago. Not very useful undergrad degree, depressed and really anxious about work, mostly just hung out at home, did some work for my dad's business.

Then I went to law school.

Now I'm about $180k in debt, highly skilled, somewhat employable, but trapped helping my dad with legal problems. Yeah, I know.

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>>18338219
Hahah shit. Were you not able to land a job or what?

I have backup plans where blue-collar work can always net me somewhere along the lines of $65K a year. But that's whole point of me going back to school.

All I've ever worked is blue-collar, back breaking work. I want a basic white-collar job in tech industry. I feel like I may be too old now to pursue my college dreams. I feel like I didn't get to know my true identity until I was 25.

>>18338230
>Were you not able to land a job or what?
Prior to law school, ugh. I had problems. There was some work out there but very little of it actually required a degree, and my degree didn't do much for me. At a certain point I'd just fucking sit there trying to write cover letters and freeze up in panic.

Post-law school... meh. Part of it was these family legal woes had been brewing for awhile, so I let the NEET in me come back out. I realized at a certain point that I was deliberately not seeking a job out of law school.

That said, I've got a battle plan. I'm going to settle out this litigation as best I can by the end of next month and then I'm going to start applying for judicial clerkships. If that doesn't work out, I'm going to start a contract consulting firm for small tech businesses. Charge a flat rate to write EULAs, sales agreements, and the like. Those are things I can do. It's weird, I get panicked when it comes to applying for jobs, but when I'm the boss and trying to sell myself, I get all confident.

I feel like being 26 is literally the worst age for this time period. Life is so utterly fucked for us. Education and school we had lagged behind the the post 2009 tech/economy/globalization boom.

>26
>took fucking years to finish degree and graduate due to crippling depression
>finish school
>can't find a job for an entire year after hundreds of applications and cover letters
>couldn't get anything even remotely close to what I want(basically just a job in my fucking field)
>every position is a scam, "sales rockstar, unlimited potential, our top employees are making 6 figures"
>get really desperate
>work for LITERALLY for free for 4 months doing telemarketing just to get something on my resume
>finally land two job offers
>accept one, turn down the other
>job I accept turns me down last minute
>back to being jobless. 2 years now.
>just got a job I could have got right out of hs working for minimum wage with fucking retarded idiots

I've been seriously considering jumping off a parking lot building for the last few weeks. I've been close to jumping.

>tfw living in a country with free education
>government actually pays you to study
>almost impossible to start career in dept
Good feels.

>>18338259
The quality of education can't be that great if you can't even spell debt.

>>18338269
IT'S FREE REAL EDUCATION

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>>18338256
Fuck this is what I dread. At least you're 26 AND got your degree and graduated.

I have to start as an old fart. Didn't even get to live the

>get laid and party every night
>university experience extraordinaire

Really want to get into the tech industry

>>18338256
I saw the writing on the wall, plus my family got fucked in the recession and it was either cancer treatment for my grandma or I go to college. Now I've got 7 years of job experience 5 as a manager, had my own business, and am applying for jobs in the 70k/ year range that also allow me to move out of this hot humid hellhole I've been busting ass in.

college started being a meme right as I went and frankly I got lucky getting forced out by financial stuff. and any job that requires a degree I can either circumvent with experience or I don't need it.

in all seriousness, fuck what society has done for my generation.

>>18338320
>I have to start as an old fart. Didn't even get to live the
>get laid and party every night
>university experience extraordinaire

It's all a state of mind, anon. I started law school at 27 and graduated at 30. I went out to the bars with my 22-year-old classmates every Thursday. You can hang out with younguns at 26. They'll fucking look up to you if you can take that attitude with them. No joke. Or you can find other nontrads. Or hang out with grad students.

Really OP, college is what you make of it. There are tons of people in their mid-20s going through undergrad. There are also plenty of people in their 30s going through. In my law school graduating class of about 150 we had at least a half dozen people in their 30s and 40s.

>>18338340
Damn you put me at ease.

In my thinking, I'm working towards my life-long career. I want to work towards something I'll bust ass at until I retire.

Even if it means going back to school with kids

>>18338320
>get laid and party every night
>university experience extraordinaire

What makes me more upset, this never happened to me. I went to community college then straight into a commuter school. I made zero friends despite being a chill normie.

>>18338327
>in all seriousness, fuck what society has done for my generation

We got fucked hard fuck the boomers. FUCK the shitty high schools. Fuck all the fake advice about going to school. I couldn't go to the university of my choice because of the recession, everyone decided to go back to school and I had to wait as much as half a year to take a class I wanted during community college.

It's all a fucking waste. They all want a degree but one wants to hire you without 4 years of experience.

For most companies you don't even have a chance and never will. Top corporations have contracts with certain schools to do recruiting from those schools. Don't go to Stanford? You're shit out of luck with entry level positions anon.

Want to come back and get a higher role? Sorry. Those positions are reserved for those entry level kids who graduate from the companies rotional graduate programs

College is for the rich and elite to get rubber stamps before going on to be more rich

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Im 21. Gonna have to pay atleast $1000 for next semester in community college cause this is the second semester i fail again. I push shopping carts for a living and live at home. You kinda wasted time but fuck it.

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>>18338365
Fuck this is what I feel is what I don't understand here in the US.

I'm a foreigner who naturalized here so my family decided to become Americans from a worse-off country. They are working their ass off in blue-collar work, making do with ~$65K annual combined. No one taught me anything about US educational system, age milestones or building wealth/experience. I had to find out all that shit on my own. I came into realization at around age 25 and I feel that should have been at around age 16 or 18.

I want to be able to have a shot at a decent white-collar desk job in tech industry and I felt college would be a way to do that. I don't have much capital or connections and I have to start from scratch at age 26. Makes me feel like a completely waste of breathe in the USA. But I want to give it a shot and give back to the country that has housed me. But like you say, it feels like a gated community; especially for people like me who literally have to start from nothing.

>feelsbadman

>>18338230
>I have a backup plan job making $65k
Quit crying about your fucking life you child

>>18338373
What? A person cannot dream of a work he feels to be enjoyable and is closer to his passions in life?

I do not enjoy toiling away, day and night for a meager wage, in a job I do not enjoy. It sucked the life out of me; so much so I was a walking zombie day in and day out. Nothing but a wage zombie. No free-time, no vacations, just endless work. The cost of living offsets what profits I have made and it's back to square one.

Hence my venture into a different, perhaps a more fulfilling career field. Granted, I may be lucky; but what difference does it matter if you waste away your life for nothing.

>>18338350
You're gonna have a blast, anon. My trick for first year law school was to find the group of girls who always knew which bar the cool kids were going to, then go and hang out. My trademark was the guy who took his DSLR everywhere. I was the "documentarian." Everyone knew my name. I fucking ran for the law school senate and WON a seat. ME. A fucking anon. A guy who had never won any popularity contest EVER. (of course in the end the shit that came with that seat wound up being my downfall because I decided to go and oppose something the president was doing, but whatever)

But yeah, you're gonna have a killer time. Sometimes, man, I've gotta tell you... it helps to wait a few years. Imagine your 18-year-old self going to college. Would he have been comfortable going to the bars? Going to parties? Mine wasn't. Mine wasn't at ALL. My 18-year-old self watched anime in his dorm room on Thursday nights. My 27-year-old self took a body shot off one of the three hottest babes in law school on a Thursday night. And the kicker? I'm fat as fuck. Glory days and all that, but it really happened. It's all about having the right attitude.

>>18338383
I never had a problem making friends and attraction from girls that are even younger than me. Infact, I have a girlfriend that is younger by a few years.

The problem is the missed milestones you know? No one told me this shit.

>>18338371
>No one taught me anything about US educational system, age milestones or building wealth/experience. I had to find out all that shit on my own. I came into realization at around age 25 and I feel that should have been at around age 16 or 18.

Oh god, OP, you have no idea how common that experience is even among natural-born Americans. In my case, I was the first in my family to go to law school. My dad had gone to *med* school. Completely fucking different, and I had no lawyers to talk to growing up. Like nobody. I had no idea what I was doing. I embarrassed myself a lot. Fuck, I didn't even really know how lawyers became lawyers until I was about 23.

>>18338391
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

>fuck my life

foreal

>>18338398
It's a struggle man. Like I look at people like my law professors and am like, how the fuck did these guys get here? Oh, they knew they wanted to do this from their time they were kids. And at least one parent was a professor, so they learned how to write for publication at an early age just by reading mom/dad's shit.

This is just the struggle of moving upwards in class. We may or may not reach the pinnacle of our chosen arts, but provided our children don't sink back down in class, they'll stand a damn good chance of achieving everything we fail to achieve.

>>18338408
Lots of them around here where I live. Groomed for greatness from the very start.

My family had to claw their way towards something greater. I'm swimming against the current. I'll be damned if I don't at least give it a try. How did other people get where they're at? Exactly how you said.

But it makes me sad. Like I overhear some Chinese kids my age making close to $100K like it's no big deal in software. I'm making close to nothing right now.

>just