I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I'm a 40-something SEI&T engineer, Senior Principal, at Large Aerospace Firm A. 20 years of experience. My beard

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I'm a 40-something SEI&T engineer, Senior Principal, at Large Aerospace Firm A. 20 years of experience. My beard is completely and thoroughly gray, my bald spot is spectacular, and my demands on my employer are high. I could shit on my boss's desk and management would politely ask me to not do so again and move my office further away. If I quit, Large Aerospace Firm B would hire me and if I didn't like their offer Large Aerospace Firm C would hire me. If I no longer wanted to work at a Large Aerospace Firm, NüSpace Firm X would hire me. Maybe with a slight pay cut but they also tend to be in lower cost of living areas. And I'm merely average. Shitty school paid for with GI bill with mediocre grades due to having to work full time while taking 15 credits a semester, a couple of professional memberships I don't invest enough time into, and a history of working on projects that have imploded due to scope creep or poor management. In what fields do engineers work where unemployment is even possible? What locations? In my field (rockets and satellites and the like), at my location (middle Atlantic), we are starved for employees. Except for the junior engineers, hired in a mad dash directly out of school to snap up bodies as space has exploded, everyone I work with is ten thousand years old. There's a massive chasm between 20 year olds and 10,000 year olds because everyone in their 30s and 40s has gone to work for some dot-com company whose only purpose in life is to steal their user's personal data and invent new ways of spamming ads everywhere. Being old is a net positive because you know where the bodies are hidden, how to hide them, and can teach the kids how and where to hide them.