I’m [blank] years old and still can’t [blank]

SupahEwok

Malapropic Homophone
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Man, a lot more folk in their 30's and 40's than I expected in this thread.

I'm 27 and I still can't work out any career/job direction that's above the retail level. Been trying to figure something out for a decade and I've got nothing. I've got no dreams or aspirations whatsoever
I'm 27 too, I spent about 8 years in and out of college, and just landed my first professional offers. My only advice is to pick something bearable and just stick with it. "Following your passion" is a fairy tale for a lot of people. Just pick something, do some research on whether it can pay you enough to cover your lifestyle and has some upwards mobility, and just do it. Use the weekends to try out making craft goods or writing a book or whatever in the hopes you stumble into something you love, after you get a 9-5 or something that lets you live with some security and contentment.

Like, very few people, I think, are all that passionate about plumbing. But shit man, it'll pay your bills a lot better than retail.
 

Elvis Starburst

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My only advice is to pick something bearable and just stick with it. "Following your passion" is a fairy tale for a lot of people. Just pick something, do some research on whether it can pay you enough to cover your lifestyle and has some upwards mobility, and just do it. Use the weekends to try out making craft goods or writing a book or whatever in the hopes you stumble into something you love, after you get a 9-5 or something that lets you live with some security and contentment.

Like, very few people, I think, are all that passionate about plumbing. But shit man, it'll pay your bills a lot better than retail.
Fair advice. However, I've had various jobs (and am still working currently) where I can pay the bills fine. In my downtime, I've had plenty of time to figure out what I love. But the problem is that I still haven't found something like that. I haven't stopped thinking about it for a long time now and it has been a blank spot in my mind for ages. I could go and work as an electrician, work in IT, construction, etc etc, if I wanted to pursue it. The issue becomes if that's something I want to even do with my time. Can't be worse than retail I guess.

It doesn't even have to be a passion thing, or something I love doing. It just has to be something I want to do for a job. It's been finding anything like that that's been my long time struggle
 

Fieldy409

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I'm 32 and don't know how to get rid of a car lol. I gave a shit car away to wreckers in exchange for you know, not paying for removal.

I decided to opt out of owning a car for now, it was just destroying my savings and with covid I'm not even travelling much. So I didn't bother fixing or pre-registering my car. Gave it to a wrecker.

Suddenly a cop turned up a month later saying that my car had been driving around unregistered, speeding and the guy stole fuel. The wreckers didn't destroy it, they fixed it. Luckily the copper told me he knew it wasn't me because I didn't look like the guy but I needed to go tell the government I didn't own the car anymore since a criminal owns it now.

It was such a fucking hassle too because the form for transferring ownership assumed I knew things about the people I have it to like business name and date of birth to identify them(who gives strangers their date of birth?) We had just texted this guy's wife on Facebook to come get it haha. I just played dumb and 'accidentally' gave wrong answers in minor things until I got a human to talk to and got some sort of notice added to the database that I didn't own the car anymore, sometimes it works to brute force your way to a competent human with burecracy that way....


I thought an unregistered car could just be sold or given away no fuss. Wrong, at least for a certain amount of time after not paying registry they still consider you the owner here in Australia until you say otherwise.
 

Gordon_4

The Big Engine
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Ok then, I'm 35 and 'm bad at ironing clothes, and afterwards neatly folding them. Oh, and terrible at cleaning windows. Luckily I managed to foist those onto my girlfriend's half of the shores. On the flipside, I absolutely roflstomp her in the kitchen, cuz she's a bad cook.
My brother. For the life of me, the iron is a confusing and eldritch device. I can do most things; but not iron.

And I’m 34, in the spirit of the thread.
 
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gsilver

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Apr 21, 2010
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I'm in my late 30s and I still don't know how to answer all the weird (and frequently illegal, since they love to "casually" bring up things like age, religion, and marital status) questions that they ask me in interviews.
It's like an entirely different language compared to real life, filled with uncomfortable bullshit and sounding like you're super-duper excited about a completely interchangeable company, which might as well be almost any other company on the planet, but I have to convince them that this is absolutely my top choice (despite having been applying for months) and I'm the absolute best at it, even though probably nearly every applicant could probably do the job just as well as me and vice-versa... I've been told that my team is the best that any given manager that I've worked under that I've come to the conclusion that they're all the same.

With the only jobs that I've gotten, the companies seemed overly eager to hire me going into it.
Maybe the CEO decided that he liked me for some reason, maybe the manager used to work for the same company I did, maybe they just didn't get many applicants. Either way, the companies that I've gotten offers from seemed overly eager to hire me, in particular, from the start of the process.

All of which leads me to believe that it's all a lot of garbage.

//And these are fairly well-paid jobs, too, as I'm in software development. No, I really don't see *that much* difference in the various grab-bags of frameworks, languages, and databases being used, even though such things are *very very* important to hiring managers. Get a job by luck or circumstance, learn their tech stack, do the job until they push you too far in excessive work hours, or their shareholders decide that Covid-19 is the end of the world and make management panic, or whatever. Repeat.
 
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XsjadoBlayde

~it ends here~
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To be uncomfortably honest, there's a lot as it's becoming clearer somethings haven't mentally developed properly in comparison to the average normal adult, and even looking back at younger years there was definitely differences which alienated me from others a lot more than I could've been aware of at time. Is a legitimate growing concern as time goes on, as the goal of a fulfilling life or any sense of earned contentment appears ever more impossible and grasps at a semblance of humanity reveal themselves as only neurotic fantasies. To avoid delving into the checklist of pros for euthanasia to pick one on the more flippant pool, perhaps it's that I can't quite fill out forms when people are behind me in a queue without making dumb mistakes like writing a different date of birth or a ballsed up signature or any simple personal detail. And age is old enough, for some reason am less comfortable sharing a number than personal fears.
 

Xprimentyl

Made you look...
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Still 40, but just learned that the little flag on a mailbox is to alert mail carriers that you've got outgoing mail in the box. Had no idea. I thought it was to let you know mail had been delivered, and always wondered why the mail person never used it.
 

ObsidianJones

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I'm 40 years old, and I can not ride a bike.

Some of you know, I grew up in the Bronx. I grew up in a section of the Bronx that had a large elderly population. A lot of people began to die out, and it was cheap enough rent that younger couples started to move in.

Apparently, the elderly population got together before I was born, tired of having to dodge the young children with their bikes. Myth was there was a big collision.

From that time on, if you were caught riding your bike, it was a 25 dollar fine (back when that was actually near half of a week's groceries). Issued by the Cops.

If you were caught a second time, the bike was taken away and it was 50 dollars.

By the time I moved away from there, I was old enough to catch a cab or friend's parents picked us up. Then we got old enough to drive.

It still looks like Witchcraft to me. But I plan to buy a bike by this summer.
 

Drathnoxis

Became a mass murderer for your sake
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Man, it never fails to startle me when I'm reading a thread and suddenly see a post from me, and then realize that it's actually a necro from a year ago.
 

Kae

That which exists in the absence of space.
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Lose 1d20 sanity points.
I'm 40 years old, and I can not ride a bike.

Some of you know, I grew up in the Bronx. I grew up in a section of the Bronx that had a large elderly population. A lot of people began to die out, and it was cheap enough rent that younger couples started to move in.

Apparently, the elderly population got together before I was born, tired of having to dodge the young children with their bikes. Myth was there was a big collision.

From that time on, if you were caught riding your bike, it was a 25 dollar fine (back when that was actually near half of a week's groceries). Issued by the Cops.

If you were caught a second time, the bike was taken away and it was 50 dollars.

By the time I moved away from there, I was old enough to catch a cab or friend's parents picked us up. Then we got old enough to drive.

It still looks like Witchcraft to me. But I plan to buy a bike by this summer.
If it makes you feel better I didn't learn how to use one until I was 15, it's not as old as you are but definitely unusual to learn in high school.
 

Dalisclock

Making lemons combustible again
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I'm 38 and I still can't whistle. Tried plenty when I was younger, never managed to make it work.

Also, even at my most fit, was never able to jump rope more then 3 times in a row.

SHAME!

I'm 30 years old, and every time I need to tie a tie I need to watch a youtube tutorial first.

To be fair, I've never worked a job where I had to wear a tie. I'm in the entertainment industry and every company I've worked at had a casual dress code. I only need to wear a tie at weddings, funerals, and job interviews, and those 3 things aren't even a yearly event for me so I've never gotten the practice of tying a tie down.
I briefly knew how to tie a tie because when I joined the US Navy, we had a uniform where a tie was no shit part of the uniform and in basic training, learning to tie it was part of it(and you had to do it fast). Then, thank god, that uniform got discontinued(HOORAY!) and I've only had to wear one to job interviews(and I use a youtube vid every time). Also, I learned about clip ons and...yep.

Sadly, I still had to put up with the neckerchief on the Naval Dress Uniform for my entire time in. It's okay, you can say it, they look stupid and they're uncomfortable. The black ones don't have pockets either.
 
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Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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God, everyone is so fucking old here. 🤣

And so am I. ☹

Anyway, 38 and I still can't make friends. Well, I could back in my early teens, but then I lost it, never to return.