21 and completely confused.
I am insanely confused on what to do with my life. For context I’ve always been drawn to tech. I used to volunteer for my church from 6th grade to high school graduation doing live broadcasting stuff. It was more of a mega church so it was definitely an operation but I enjoyed it and loved the people there. I came to college in 2024 majoring in cybersecurity and the program was awful I hated it. I used “AI” to justify my reason for changing majors even though it wasn’t all that good then but I also completely derailed my path on what I wanted to do with no clear idea of where I wanted to go. Ended up changing my major before the summer to engineering management, then decided that I didn’t need college I was going into a trade, realized I didn’t wanna be in a trade so I’ll just become a cop, realized if I wanted to become a cop I should finish college, re-registered for classes the night before college started😭, was majoring in software engineering because I liked the idea of building stuff so it sounded cool, then realized AI might actually take this career so I switched to quantum physics, which leads us to now where I’m finishing second year at college and definitely don’t plan on going back in person.
My reason for not going back is 1: AI is actually getting really good now to the point where I don’t really know what is going to survive without trying to buy into hype because there’s a lot of it haha. 2: Staying 2 years in college wasting all that money and not knowing what I even want to do while not even knowing where AI will be in 2 years feels like the dumbest thing I could possibly so especially when online degrees exist. So I can atleast say that I know I’m not going to in person college anymore at the least.
Where I’m confused is what to do. GPT 5.5 is probably coming out this week so ig I’ll have to brace for a pending heart attack but even if LLM’s stop scaling in intelligence the logic logics. I’m not even going to go into the whole companies forcing AI adoption or what happens if the bubble pops because that isn’t necessarily my lane. But if we stopped training llms today and were just happy with what we have, we have to worry about agentic workflows and harnesses. They aren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and can cause really costly mistakes but openclaw which really popularized it only released in January of this year. Now we have agents like Hermes agent, opencode, pi, and that is just a couple not to mention all the skills and tools and integrations you can give them ALSO not to mention that you can train models to work better with agents.
While that was an extremely brief explanation of the AI world rn I am so lost on what to do. My motivation is flatlined and I’m honestly more depressed if anything. I went from extremely hopeful abt the future to watching all of my opportunities possibly vanish in front of my eyes. The whole “AI will just create more opportunities” argument is also a massive cope. This technology can do work that requires abstract thinking and reasoning (to a degree right now ofc). Whenever I talk to someone about it they make me feel like I’m overreacting and some people even flat out make me feel like I’m crazy. When I ask people what they know about ai after they completely disagree with me they just blank. Sometimes I’ll ask if they’ve even used AI and some people have said “I’ve tried it before”. Everybody has so many opinions about a technology they aren’t even trying. Between the hypers saying everything is gone in “18 months” and the deniers saying it’ll never happen it feels impossible to actually get a good read on the situation.
I guess I just wanna ask anybody that is in the industry or anybody that is knowledgeable or honestly any advice in general would be helpful. I’m really thinking about just getting a warehouse job and violently self teach myself AI deployment, or MLops, or agentic engineering or even AI security idk I just something to land a job in a startup I feel like with my current state I need a company to take a chance on me so if I prove I can ship I feel like I’d have the best luck getting in there or or maybe even try to land a job in embedded systems or something like that possibly getting a more entry role in spaceX and trying to climb the ladder or get experience there I have a crazy work ethic so I’d fit in well there. If by 6 months I still have a long way to go I’m thinking about just applying to police academy so atleast I’ll have a stable paycheck and a meaningful career. Maybe I am overreacting maybe I’m not I don’t know I would really really appreciate some realistic and grounded advice on what I should do and where I should go. If I’m being honest I’m just terrified about my future atp and would really appreciate some guidance thank you for any suggestions and if you read this far 🫶🏽