Take random jobs.

Take random courses. (College or vocational)

A lot of people stumble into their carrers. Don’t sweat it to much if you don’t have to.

Ok this one is hard

1. Don’t sweat it, you have time. I only discovered what I was good at(and had fun to do) late in life.
2. work and/or study. Find shit job, they build character. They’re hard, they stinks, you’ll hate them. That’s life but that’s also part of the process. They’re probably low cost school in your area, take stupid course, art, programming, another language, etc. Don’t do nothing
3. open a saving account doesn’t matter how little you put in their but it’s a start
4. have fun

I’m in my 30’s and still don’t know what the fuck I want to do most of the time. Just do what makes you happy in your free time and what makes you money for work. If you can make those things overlap, fantastic. But I’ve always found that doing what I love for money makes me love it less. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to get it all figured out. Noone has it all figured out by the time they die, and it’s not worth wasting your time worrying instead of living.

Be good to yourself and others and you’ll have few regrets.

Just try things. You’ll figure out what you like/don’t like fairly quickly and you might stumble into something you absolutely love.

There’s value in working a job and realizing it is not what you want to do as well. I did that for 10 years before I realized that I want to do something else instead and that I didn’t like having a boss either.

Don’t beat yourself up for not having a plan. You’re not an aberration in society. The people who plan everything are just the loudest so we think that’s the norm. Sooner or later, out of necessity or love, you’ll hit upon an idea that you’ll pursue.

School unfortunately does a pretty bad job preparing folks for what comes after. You go from a strictly regulated lifestyle where you are given very little freedom to a lifestyle you have to construct on your own.

The best way to figure things out is to give it a try. Maybe you saw a flyer for a trivia night and that vaguely interests you? Give it a try. Did a video about making a ship in a bottle catch your eye? Give it a try. Did you see someone having a really good time riding a skateboard and idly wonder if it’d be fun? Give it a try.

You shouldn’t feel bad on trying stuff and not continuing with them after a bit. That just means you weren’t really into that thing as much as you thought you might be.

A lot of the stuff you try might not be for you. I found out that I hate trivia at bars through personal experience. But that’s ok, cuz I also found out I love karaoke at bars when the karaoke crowd came in after trivia. You’ll meet people you like. You’ll meet people you dislike. You’ll meet people you are largely ambivalent about. It might take awhile, but you should only move at your own pace. Don’t worry about other people and stay focused on yourself.

Something important to learn is that you should not be defined by your job. Your job is just something you do to pay the bills. If you are lucky, you’ll have a job that you like and is personally fulfilling, but that’s pretty rare in this day and age. You are much more likely to find happiness and fulfillment outside your job.

Try to enjoy the little things in life. I have been trying to make the perfect breakfast for a few years now as a way to get myself to enjoy waking up in the morning. Stack up your little joys and hopefully, you’ll have enough joy for the entire day. Maybe even enough joy to share with others.

Much like exercise, there’s no real shortcut to self-actualization. You’ll need to do a lot of experimentation to find what you like an enjoy. I would recommend finding a consumptive hobby and a constructive hobby. You most likely already have tried a bunch of consumptive hobbies, as our society encourages consumption. If you haven’t I would highly recommend experimenting with constructive hobbies, where you make stuff. It doesn’t have to be drawing art, it can be stuff like working with wood, assembling models, writing reviews to bad movies. Anything where you add something to the world that didn’t exist before. Consumptive hobbies I enjoy are reading books and eating cookies. Constructive hobbies I enjoy are making linoprints and baking cookies.

Your fears and doubts are ones that countless humans have experienced. They overcame those doubts and I’m sure you can too. You are not alone in your struggles and if things ever get too tough, there are always people willing to lend you a hand.

Good luck, buddy.

Imagine that your body is like a metal detector, but instead of making noise it makes emotions. Excitement is the primary signal that you’re going in the right direction. Fear is a secondary signal. If you do something because you are afraid of something else, that’s the wrong direction usually. If you do something because it excites you, that’s the right direction. Sometimes, if you are afraid of something that’s the thing you should do (lean into the fear).

This is how you “figure it out”. There is no framework, there is no rubric. Everything you can be told from the outside is already outdated. The clearest most accurate signal will always come directly from your experience of your body

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

Try to find something to do that lands somewhere in the middle

tldr: exercise, learn to cook, and start saving some money (keep your expenses low as long as you can)

I know a lot has changed since I was 18 but if I could give myself some advice to get a better start in life on a second try, here are a the first things that I would share.

1. Learn to take care of your body, it’s the only one you get and it is much easier to work on your fitness and health when you are 18 than when you are 30 or 40 or whatever. While you have free time, this is a great time to learn and practice some good habits that you can carry with you for the rest of your life.

Two main ideas here:

• Find some kind of movement exercises that you enjoy doing and can make a routine of. You don’t need to be an athlete or anything. It could be a daily walk, yoga, jogging, weight training, climbing, cycling, sports. For sports, I would look at things that are easy to keep up with as you get older, typically things with less structure or equipment requirements. For example, American football or volleyball might be harder to manage than tennis/pickle ball or indoor soccer/football. Don’t make it a chore; you don’t have to be great (or even good) at any of it, just find something that you want to keep up with. I know a lot of people also make connections with other people in some of these places (like climbing, cross fit, and sports gyms) but those also tend to be more expensive options.

• Learn to cook (if you don’t already know how) and try to build a short list of reasonably healthy recipes that you enjoy and could live on every day, if needed. Try to focus on simple things to start, like eggs or oatmeal for breakfast, healthy sandwiches or wraps for lunch (try to minimize processed meats or peanut butter), for dinner maybe pastas, casseroles, salads, roasted vegetables & potatoes.

Try to come up with things that are quick and easy to make and especially things that can be made from staples that last a long time in the pantry or fridge. For a lot of people, planning, shopping for, and preparing food every day is a major challenge once when added to a job, school, or family. However, if you have a reliable list of foods that you can repeat without much effort, that takes away a major point of stress in your future life.

2. If you have a good relationship with your family, take advantage of this time to minimize your expenses and get some savings started. A lot of people are in a rush to move out and “start” their adulthood. If you are in a bad family situation, that may be the right move. If things are good, maybe get a low stress part-time job to earn a little income and get some experience.

For me, a big part of “low stress” is know that you can walk away at any time because you have a safety net. In my case, I can’t quit my job because my family needs the income, which makes stupid things stress me out more than they should. However, when I was a teenager working low wage retail and fast food jobs, they did not stress me out because I knew I could walk out the door at any time without caring. From the outside looking in, my current job pays much better and is much more chill than working retail but I was way less stressed flipping burgers while living at home as a teenager.

The biggest “mistakes” I made after I graduated high school were eating a ton of fast food while going to college, dropping my gym routine when my parents canceled our membership when I was 20, and rushing to move out with my friends about the same time. The result of those things caused me to get fat and deeply in debt in my 20s and it took me all of my 30s to get back to even. I was probably around 35 when I got back to anything close to my high school graduation body weight and around 40 before my net worth went positive and I started any meaningful retirement savings.

I’m assuming you’re not rich, so the first thing is: get a job. Start to work and saving what you can. It’s important to keep moving to keep the inertia going and not stall in a place where you’re completely broke.

What job? Whatever. Do Uber. Do McDonalds. Look for something. Get experience. Forget about dreams. They are useless and overrated. In the process of doing jobs, be curious. Spend the energy you would spend on dreaming into observing. You will find quickly what you like and what you hate. If the job is not for you get out and find another one. Go towards things you like, feel comfortable and feel capable doing.

While doing it ask yourself “What’s next?”, followed by “How?”. I’m working in car shop cleaning and organizing, what’s next? Fixing cars looks interesting, maybe I should try that? How? I’ll try to learn from these guys and do courses. What’s next? I may get a job fixing cars. Great, I know how to fix cars, they hired me and I like it. What’s next? Maybe having my own shop? How? You get the idea.

Keep a diary. It’s hard because it feels ridiculous. Like a teenager rambling about feelings. I still hate doing it to this day, and I’m 50. But it gives me insights about things I’m doing, because it helps you to see patterns in your behaviour. Like quitting when things were too hard to do because the noise in my head was unbearable and I had this depression that would not quit and I felt I as an alien around people and maybe I should do therapy and HOLY FUCK I’m autistic and that’s why EVERYTHING was so hard. The knowledge you may gain doing a diary is unvaluable. Do it the way you feel comfortable (or less painful) to do - physical notebook, computer, tablet, whatever.

In short: keep on moving, be curious, be self-reflective.

That’s all what I have for now, good luck!

I wouldn’t stress too much about finding “the perfect fit” or some so-called dream job. Plenty of us work jobs that are tolerable and just pay the bills and use that money for our own enjoyment on the weekends. You’ll probably have to wade through some shit jobs for shit pay before you get there though.

My opinion is that you need to find some hobbies, like number one most important thing. Your hobbies are your true vocation, work is what you do to pay for them. Start small if you’re not rolling in money, there are lots of cheap ways to make art, or you could learn to cook more from scratch. Try out a musical instrument, write some bad poetry, build a Gundam model.

Finding work for now does not have to determine your career. Temp agencies are actually kind of great (in an icky sort of way) because they already found a lot of the jobs from office buildings to warehouses to factories. In fact a whole lot of companies only hire through temp agencies. If you want to try a trade walk up to a local shop and ask if they need a green helper.

You decide.

And you work at it.

Change your mind? Fine . Then work at it.

Don’t give up because it’s hard. Change only because it’s wrong for you.

And work at it.

You know, there’s this little shared but ever so prevalent fact about life: Not many know what they are doing. If anyone. You adapt and you try your best and things happen one way or another. You don’t have that much overall agency or the needed level of deeper understanding or foresight to control most things. You control what you can, endlessly despair over the things you can’t and still ever try and fail to control them, and at the end of the day you try your best to make it all make sense.

Some might even convince themselves that they are on top of it all. There are very few that genuinely are. Most of us don’t know what the hell we are doing and somehow stay afloat. Some better than others. I for one struggle.

I’m approaching middle age and genuinely have zero idea what is going on or what to do with my life.

Somehow things still work out mostly. Life is good. Good enough, that is.

All to say: try not to worry about this too much. You will just waste effort and energy trying to grasp on something even the best of us genuinely struggle with and only select few ever grasp. And those are mostly nepobabies. And the fact they grasp it, is mostly the endless opportunities they get to fail and try again with the safety net and resources they just have at hand.

Unless you have that kind of resources, just try your best to balance your passions, things that bring joy, and then time spent making some board member somewhere a fuck ton of money while getting scraps yourself. You need those scraps, the system is mostly shit, but the happiness is in understanding and accepting the chaos of it all. Not trying too much. You’ll just disappoint yourself.

Don’t expect to know what you want to do as in with your life. Try your best to focus and find joy in the things you know you want to do, as in individual actions. Then tolerate the time and energy you have to spend for someone else to get wealthy in order to sustain those little joys.

Eventually you’ll end up in a place that feels like home and where you have some clarity and purpose. Until then, you’ll think you’ve found them, you’ll fail, you’ll stumble and pick yourself up again, and that’s life.

The best you can do is just go with the flow and trust in what you know: yourself. Find happinesses, however small, and embrace them. Accept the rest for what it is. Mostly necessities to stay afloat to get with the small joys you know and want.

That’s the most any of us can do, unless we are born with a very rare set of skills, quirks or temperaments, or a golden spoon up our as. Seeing as the vast majority of us aren’t, you likely aren’t either. So don’t try to act like you do. You’ll just get depressed, suffer to no end, trying to fit a mold you were never going to fit.