I would’ve wanted to be a freelance builder, crafter, designer and engineer. Here’s why I know I can’t, it’s because I am terrible with just knowing things. An experienced craftsman knows their tools by heart, can pick one up that they absolutely need for the job at hand. They know their workshop, inside and out. They can calculate measurements with barely thinking. They just have it together.
That’s not me. You can show me 3 different types of a philips screwdriver and for every one, I’d be like “erm…uh, still philips to me!” when there is subtle differences between them. I can barely measure things to save my life. I am just stunted to learn so many of these things, but I’m only capable of doing small projects at the very least.
People like Adam Savage really have inspired me, having seen the things he can do and how passionate he is about what he does. I love that. I wish I could be that. But I’m not.
Any given day, it changes - sometimes I’m ten pages deep in legal research and thought “why didn’t I go to law school?” Other times I think about how being a pilot would be fun, or I wish I would’ve stayed with my buddy’s rally team, or if I’d…
Basically, I have lots of dreams. If I had to pick one, currently, I’d say that I wish I could be one of those litter pick up road crews but make enough money to survive.
Pilot, or work on a deep sea vessel
For me, I don’t think there’s anything I can’t do. Its a belief that’s generally been helpful in accomplishing great things.
With that said, if I had a do-over I might go into law. Would have been helpful to have an adult help me navigate that route as a youngster and I’m happy with what ive done and excited for what comes next.
Game developer of some kind. In my wildest dreams I’m the Stardew Valley guy.
I’ve tried to pursue it a few times but I’m not strong-willed enough to overcome the admittedly minor obstacles. I got shafted in school for IT class. Had 100% on the exam but the teacher was a huge bitch and wouldnt take my coursework so I only got a C. Which meant college wouldnt take me for game dev course and I had to do a baby-mode IT course where they made us learn google (seriously, 2 months of learning how to use AND and shit in google) and photoshop. By the time the class moved onto hardware and programming languages the teacher wouldnt let me participate because I didnt finish the photoshop course.
Decided to just try it alone and managed to scrape together an almost functional prototype after a few weeks. Then found out I’d selected the wrong option incredibly early in the process which meant I had to start all over again. Asked for advice online and instead of advice or information on what else to look out for just received shitload of people telling eachother what an idiot OP is and how people like that shouldn’t even try when they don’t even understand whatever that was. I’m too thin skinned to deal with it so I just gave up.
When AI started taking off a few years back I got a little excited, thinking it could be time to try again now that I can ask computer-daddy to help. Before I’ve even got round to seeing if its feasible, you know, take a look around.
Mate, Claude Code has helped me immensely get so much further into game development than I could ever do on my own. I still build the game myself by hand but it’s knowledge on practices, the software etc is like having every youtube video tutorial next to you.
House husband. Maybe i’ll get lucky.
Designing custom items for the elderly and handicapped seems like a fulfilling pass time. This is something that would have to be mostly done for free or very low cost.
Blogger. I would dive into random topics, and write about them. The blog could also have relevant pictures, videos, diagrams or whatever I happen to be interested in at the time. It’s just that blogging probably isn’t a viable profession, so I’ll continue working for a sinking ship in the meantime. When this company goes bankrupt, I’ll figure something out.
Full time musician. I have a mortgage and a (moderate) lifestyle to maintain. I still make and play music on the side but can never make it a full time job.
I would like a sinecure as the front desk correspondent for a society of jaded cassandras. I would get to write scathing told-ya-sos on the behalf of smart people, shall we say four a day at most so that I could take time to soak in the context, sit in the affronted rage, and write something truly bilious on somebody else’s behalf. It would then get sent to the responder for a round of notes and corrections before being printed, neglectfully stained with a coffee mug stamp, and mailed out to the offending party.
On second thought, two or three a day. I could easily get sidetracked.
None of this sounds interesting. If anything you make everything tedious. You make any sense of a new world sound awful, pedantic, overly wordy and pretty lame.
Getting sidetracked sounds preferable to your paragraphs.
But they basically want to be a professional hater. I could see doing it for a couple months, at least.
My real dream job would be not needing to have a job
Yeah I have no singular passion. I work to eat, but if I could eat without working, it would free me up to learn more, volunteer more, and experience the world more. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but a lack of money stymies happiness.
This is the way.
Just Be.
I was basically doing it until AI came along, the only difference is that I’d rather pick what I work on. That is, I’m a software engineer. Now, they want AI agent baybsitters making it hard to find work that doesn’t use AI.
I guess if I had to pick a second, it would be some kind of professional student or something that works in teams as someone who has a wide variety of knowledge across topics and domains and can use it together while still doing some kind of software engineering along with it.
I’m also a small-scale farmer where I just sell extra, but I don’t know that I would like that as my fulltime job; I certainly wouldn’t like the salary.
My dream job was transcription. It became voice-to-text editor. It is gone now. Was a beautiful few years of tuning the world out and just typing :(
Same on the software engineering front, I feel you.
I would love to disappear into the wilderness and thrive, like Homer sinking into those bushes.
Either a botanist or wildlife rehabilitation. Life sort of turned really shitty really early and I had to get a “less idealistic” college degree so I went with social/behavioral stuff. Literally have become a cog in machine. It did support me and my son his whole life, but when I was recently given the option to start school again… I couldn’t make the decision to switch to something like what I wanted because I already have almost 20yrs working in this field. So now I’m just getting licensed and rooting here for good. I just watch hella documentaries
Different route getting there, but I’m at a similar point with my career in tech. I inadvertently discovered conservation related volunteer work (invasive species management, native seed collecting/spreading, etc) in my area a few years ago and getting involved with that has been a huge outlet for me to contribute to the types of things I wish I was doing professionally. Might be worth looking into if you want to scratch the itch without a full career change.
Man, I just wanna sit at a bench and fix things. More than that, I want to go to school to learn how to design better things. Can’t do either ‘cause I’m broke as hell. Can’t find work doing it because nobody wants someone who just wants to sit at a bench and fix things, it’s always gotta include some other (corporately mandated) bullshit.
If I could go back to my early 20s, I would go to travel destinations and bar tend. Alaska, Hawai’i, Bali, etc. I missed out on a lot that I had no idea existed. Today I wish I had the time to tutor prisoners how to read. I think that could be fun.
Bro do the prison tutor thing. That sounds great.
