I think there are two countercultural pieces of advice I wish someone had given me. I think both of these are more relevant than any “interests-matching” algori

I think there are two countercultural pieces of advice I wish someone had given me. I think both of these are more relevant than any “interests-matching” algorithm that pairs you with the supposed ideal career. 1. Focus more on the day to day life of what working in that career is like. Focus less on what the topic is itself, intellectually. If you’re a curious person, there are probably at least half a dozen subjects you find interesting enough to do as a career. So it is less immediately important that you pick one over another. If you had an obvious sole choice, you wouldn’t be asking this question. The under-discussed thing is that if you don’t like the daily work routine or environment of a particular profession, that intellectual content almost doesn’t matter. Especially after years and years of being in the industry. For example, if you don’t like working in an office at a desk all day, you probably will struggle with being a software engineer, no matter how interesting your find it. You might be better off looking into civil engineering, or construction management, or another semi-adjacent field that isn’t done entirely from a desk in an office. 2. This may be more of a personality thing, but try to pick a field that involves a fairly narrow set of skills which you are able to master over time. Even though many/most white collar technology jobs pay better and are at the cutting edge of the economy, I feel like (and I imagine many others do too) there is a distinct lack of “progress” in terms of your professional self development. It’s very easy to constantly learn new things, but not have them add up to any coherent whole. This is probably because technologies change so often and the business requirements vary wildly. This sort of scenario is very unlike say, a chef, in which it’s more easy to track your progress and feel like you’ve achieved something over the course of a decade.