Not sure exactly where to begin with this. Like the title says I'm a 28 year old guy working as a customer service guy in a retail store, making around $26k before taxes/ss/401k, which comes out to $325 weekly. Almost everything I make goes to bills and food. I had a second part time job for a while but it was at night and occasionally made me late for my first job so I had to stop. A significant majority of my time outside of work is spent trying to figure out ways to make more money. I haven't had a vacation or a raise in five years because my employer doesn't 'do' vacations. Currently I am in the seniormost position my store offers (there hasn't been management turnover in at least a decade).
I got my bachelors degree about seven years ago from a pretty good school (not outstanding, but definitely top 50) in a field everyone was convinced would be 'the next big thing' but despite going through Indeed, Craigslist, and the local classifieds every day I've never seen any jobs asking for even one of the skills I learned in school. Because I know people are going to ask, it's in a subfield of Digital Humanities, which is the conglomerate field that deals with arduino programming, 3D printers 101, drones 101, archiving the internet, game design, machine shop type stuff, and in general using emerging technology to make kickass creative works. Everyone did it for 4-5 years, then the interest faded when the technology became commonplace, and now my university doesn't even offer the major anymore. I've reached out to professors and the career center and only one vaguely remembers who I am, and "can't speak to my abilities in a professional setting because it's been a decade and I could be a totally different person now".
I've applied for entry level IT jobs and general clerical jobs every time I see one pop up on Indeed, and am getting to the point where I consistently get passed over for someone younger and/or in school.
My fiancee and I have talked about this every day for the past three years, to the point where we're both sick of it but neither of us knows how to fix it. We've discussed taking out loans and going back to school (second Bachelors or some kinda community college probably), which seems to be a universally bad idea according to Reddit because we'd be going into debt to compete against people a decade younger than we are. I've considered buying a $5k pickup truck and starting my own year round landscaping business (mowing, snowblowing, composting, raking leaves). My fiancee wants me to quit my job and get literally any other job. She's also told me I should get into tutoring elderly people on how to use computers, like I could hand out flyers at our church and stuff. I could see myself doing that.
Plenty of my peers and friends are in the same boat, and I can't help but feel like we all missed some kind of memo that everyone else got, and the people who 'got it' are making $45k+ and posting about what kind of home they should get or what they should invest in, while the people who didn't are living with their parents or a dozen roommates crammed into an apartment at 30-35. In college I always told myself I wouldn't start trying for a family until I was 30 and stable, and seven years later I'm way less stable than I was in school.
Is anyone else in the same boat? I'm totally burned out and at the same time I haven't even started anything meaningful yet.
Submitted September 03, 2017 at 06:22PM by whiskeyismykindof http://ift.tt/2eTonOi
