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What should I do? I’m 30 years old & am facing the next 20 years in prison with a minimum of 10 served.
I really fucked up, I’m guilty there’s no way I’m beating it (I lost control, shot someone. My worst charge is attempt murder on top of various other felonies). I will be in my 40s when released, I’m currently single with no kids. What should I do while incarcerated to make sure I can come back & have a good rest of my life. I have no previous record, I’m college educated & have been working in the jewelry industry the last 10 years. What are my realistic options going to be once I’m free?
Jobadvisor
This is a genuinely hard situation, and the fact that you're thinking this clearly about the future — accepting responsibility and planning ahead — is already meaningful. Here's honest, practical advice:
While Incarcerated (The 10+ Years)
Mental & Emotional Foundation
- Work through what happened. Seek out therapy, counseling, or psychiatric services available in prison — genuinely, not just for parole optics. Understanding why you lost control is the most important work you can do, both for your own peace and for who you become after.
- Avoid the trap of bitterness. Ten years of resentment will destroy you more than the sentence itself.
Education & Skills
- Your college education is a real asset. Many prisons have partnerships with colleges for advanced degrees — pursue one. A master's degree in business, counseling, or a trade field is entirely achievable.
- Learn everything available: vocational programs, tech certifications, paralegal training, accounting. Skills you can use with a record are gold.
- Read voraciously. History, philosophy, psychology, business, finance. You have time most people never get.
Physical Health
- Treat your body seriously. Exercise consistently, eat as well as you can, avoid substances. You want to walk out in your 40s in better physical shape than most free people.
Financial Planning (Limited but Real)
- Save any money you earn inside, even if it's tiny amounts.
- Have a trusted family member manage or invest anything you have on the outside.
- Study investing, personal finance, and business from inside.
Behavior & Record
- Stay completely clean on your disciplinary record. Every infraction costs you at parole hearings.
- Become someone staff and fellow inmates respect — this builds character and your institutional record simultaneously.
Realistic Options After Release
Employment — The Honest Picture
- Attempt murder (even as a charge, not conviction) is a serious felony. Many employers will see it. You need to go in eyes open.
- Your jewelry industry background is actually valuable because much of that world is small business, self-employment, and entrepreneurship — areas less constrained by background checks than corporate HR departments.
- Self-employment is your most realistic long-term path. A small jewelry repair shop, custom design business, estate jewelry buying/reselling — you have 10 years of industry knowledge that doesn't expire.
- Skilled trades (welding, electrical, plumbing) certified in prison are often in industries that are more pragmatic about records.
- Nonprofit and reentry organizations actively hire people with records — and your story, education, and self-awareness would make you a strong candidate for counseling or program work.
Housing
- Research your state's reentry housing resources now (or have family do it). The first 90 days out are statistically the most dangerous period for reincarceration.
- Having a plan — even a family member's couch — dramatically improves outcomes.
Relationships
- Being single now isn't a disadvantage — it means no one is waiting in pain. Use this time to become someone worth being with. People build meaningful relationships in their 40s and 50s constantly.
- Maintain every healthy outside relationship you have. Letters, calls, visits. Isolation inside breeds hopelessness.
Legal
- Find a good attorney to understand your expungement or record-sealing options in your state before release. Some felonies can be sealed after a clean period post-release. It varies enormously by state.
- Understand what rights are restored and when (voting, certain licenses, etc.).
The Realistic Mindset
You will face rejection — from employers, possibly from people you want to date, maybe from some family. That's real and it will hurt. But people with serious records build good lives constantly. The variables that matter most are: genuine change, a marketable skill, a support network, and patience.
You're 30, educated, and already thinking about accountability and rebuilding. That puts you ahead of most people in your situation before day one.
The next decade is hard, but it's not wasted time unless you treat it that way.
Is it even possible to transition from a 155k strategy role to a manual trade without nuking my entire life?
I am currently a 32-year-old Senior Director of Strategy making about one hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars a year plus bonuses. On paper I am a massive success and my parents love to brag about it to their friends. In reality I spend nine hours a day in back-to-back Zoom meetings discussing things like strategic alignment and cross-functional pivot points. If you asked me what I actually produced today the answer is absolutely nothing. I moved some boxes on a slide deck and sent fifty emails that nobody needed to read. I feel my brain turning into mush with every passing week and I am starting to hate the sound of my own voice using all these corporate buzzwords.
The problem is the golden handcuffs are starting to feel like actual ones. I have built this lifestyle around a high salary and now I am stuck with a mortgage and a husband who thinks I am being dramatic when I say I want to quit. I spent my Saturday morning weeding the garden and fixing some loose floorboards and I felt more accomplishment in those two hours than I have in the last three fiscal years at my desk. At least the floorboards are a tangible problem with a tangible solution. In my office nothing is ever realy solved it is just deferred to the next quarterly review. I am legit jealous of the people who come to fix our HVAC because they actually know how the world works.
I am basicaly a professional talker at this point. I have zero marketable skills if this company ever goes under. I am terrified that I am becoming totaly useless in any context outside of a corporate boardroom. I want to leave and do something real like furniture restoration or floral design but I would have to take a fifty percent pay cut and my husband would probably think I lost my mind. I am trading my prime years for a number on a screen while my actual competence as a human being is dying. Is there a way to downshift into a manual or creative trade without totaly ruining my financial future or is this just the price of being a high-earner in the corporate world?
Jobadvisor
This is a real tension, not a midlife crisis, and the fact that you can articulate it this clearly suggests you already know what you want — you just need permission and a plan. Here's an honest take:
You're Not Actually Trapped (Yet)
The golden handcuffs only lock if you never build an exit. At 32 with a $155k salary, you have something most people who want to make this transition don't: time and earning power to engineer it deliberately rather than rage-quit into poverty.
The people who "nuke their lives" making this switch are usually the ones who do it reactively — after burnout hits a wall, after a breakdown, after the decision gets made for them.
The Husband Problem Is The Real Problem
Everything else is solvable math. The relationship misalignment is the actual obstacle here. A few honest observations:
- "He thinks I'm being dramatic" suggests he's heard the frustration but not the depth of it. Have you actually laid out a concrete plan, or have you been venting? Those land very differently.
- He likely has real fears underneath the dismissal — mortgage, lifestyle, your future security — that aren't about dismissing you, they're about anxiety.
- This conversation needs to happen before any career decision. Not "I want to quit and do floral design" but "here's a 3-year financial plan for how we get there without losing the house."
The Actual Transition Path (That Isn't Financial Suicide)
Phase 1 — Right now, parallel track (12–18 months)
- Pick one trade to explore seriously: furniture restoration is a great candidate because startup costs are low and there's a genuine market for quality work.
- Spend weekends actually doing it — not as a hobby, but as a business test. Take commissions from friends, sell on Etsy or Facebook Marketplace, price your work like a professional.
- This answers the real question: do I love the work or just the fantasy of the work?
Phase 2 — Compress your financial exposure
- Aggressively pay down the mortgage or build a 2-year cash runway while your salary is high.
- Cut lifestyle inflation deliberately now — not as punishment but as freedom-buying.
- The math changes dramatically when you need $80k/year instead of $155k to feel secure.
Phase 3 — The bridge exit
- Your strategy background has real value in small business consulting, which you could do part-time while building the trade income.
- A $40k consulting retainer plus $40k in trade work gets you to $80k with full autonomy — that's not poverty, that's a different life.
- Many people in trades with your background end up owning the business within a few years rather than just doing the work, which is where the income recovers.
The Honest Counterpoints
A few things worth sitting with before you romanticize the trades too hard:
- Physical wear is real. The HVAC guy you're jealous of has knee problems at 50. Furniture restoration involves fumes, repetitive strain, and unglamorous grunt work alongside the satisfying parts.
- The income ceiling is lower and slower. It's absolutely possible to earn well — but it takes years to build, and the early period is genuinely lean.
- Some of what you're feeling is burnout, not a permanent preference. It's worth asking: would you feel this way if your current job had better boundaries, less meeting culture, more tangible output? Sometimes people leave careers when they actually need to leave companies.
The Bottom Line
Yes, it's possible — people do it regularly without ruining their lives. But the ones who do it well treat it like a strategic transition (ironically, exactly what you're trained for) rather than an escape. Your corporate skills aren't worthless in this new life — they're actually a competitive advantage for running a trade business that most tradespeople don't have.
The price isn't your financial future. The price is 2–3 years of deliberate, uncomfortable in-between.
That's a real price. Only you can decide if it's worth paying.
Been applying for almost a year, freelancing in between and I feel like I'm going backwards. What do I do to move forward?
Been applying since last spring. some weeks it's 10-15 applications, some weeks I can barely open the laptop. Maybe 4 real interviews the whole time. One went to a final round, they sat on it for a month and then sent the rejection.
I do freelance projects in between to keep money coming in but it's random, one decent month then nothing for six weeks. People keep saying the freelance counts as experience but it doesn't feel like it's building toward anything, it's just buying time. And it eats the hours I should be applying with.
Is freelancing working against me? How can I approach this differently to make it work?
Jobadvisor
What you're describing — the inconsistency, the energy crashes, the feeling that you're treading water — is one of the harder aspects of a prolonged job search. It's not a character flaw, it's a structural problem. Here's how to think about it differently:
Freelancing isn't the problem. Positioning is.
Freelancing does count, but only if you frame it that way. Right now it sounds like it lives in a separate mental bucket from your "real" career. The fix is simple but important: give it a title. Not "freelance work" — something like Independent Consultant or Freelance [Your Field] Specialist, with a start date of when you began. Then treat it like any job on your resume and LinkedIn, with bullet points showing outcomes, not just tasks.
The spray-and-pray approach is draining you for low returns.
10-15 applications a week with 4 real interviews in a year tells you the volume strategy isn't working. That's not a hustle problem — it's a targeting problem. The math changes dramatically when you shift to fewer, better-fit applications with actual research behind each one, versus sending the same resume to everything that moves.
The job search needs a structure, not a mood.
The weeks where you "can barely open the laptop" are a signal that you've built a system that depends on motivation — which is unreliable. Try decoupling the activities: block 2 hours on Monday/Wednesday for applications only, Tuesday for networking outreach (1-2 messages a day, not a blast), Friday for freelance admin. When it has a schedule, it stops feeling like a cloud over everything.
Networking is where the hidden interviews are.
4 interviews from what sounds like hundreds of applications is a very low conversion rate. Most jobs (especially in uncertain hiring markets) fill through referrals before they're ever posted widely. One warm introduction is worth about 20 cold applications statistically. Who do you know at companies you want to be at? Former colleagues, classmates, people in your industry on LinkedIn? That's where to put energy.
The freelance income inconsistency is solvable separately.
Random project flow isn't inevitable — it usually means you don't have a reliable lead source. Even one or two anchor clients on a retainer (small monthly scope, predictable) changes that feast-or-famine rhythm and frees up mental energy for the search.
The honest reality: you're not going backwards, you're stuck in a loop that feels like backwards because there's no visible progress. The loop breaks when the strategy changes, not when you push harder on the same approach.
What field/role are you targeting? That would help give more specific advice on the positioning and networking angle.
Help me? so I can help my mommy
Hello, To anybody who takes the time to read this, I am looking for career guidance on behalf of my mom. She is in her mid 50’s & hasn’t worked in 5 or so years and her main source of expertise is based on desk jobs. She’s been in a position where she was required to find part time and odd jobs for others, she’s worked in accounting, so on and so forth. She’s wants to work, badly. She wants something to occupy her time and also give financial relief to my father and herself as well. She went to college but it’s a basic associates in a basic major (I say with love and pride). I can supply more information on behalf of her education but at the moment I don’t have her resume on hand. Does anybody know SOMETHING that she could pursue that is good and stable for someone her age in terms of financially and longevity??? Please help.
Jobadvisor
Perfect, that really helps! Here are some great options for your mom based on her background:
Best fits given her experience:
1. Administrative Assistant / Receptionist Her desk job and accounting background makes this a natural fit. These roles are everywhere — medical offices, law firms, schools — and tend to be steady, low-pressure, and 9-to-5.
2. Medical or Dental Office Receptionist Healthcare offices are always hiring front desk staff. No medical degree needed — just organization and people skills. Very stable industry, often part-time options too.
3. Bookkeeper / Accounts Payable Clerk Her accounting experience is genuinely valuable here. Small businesses constantly need part-time bookkeepers. A quick refresher on QuickBooks (free tutorials on YouTube) would make her very hireable.
4. School or Library Clerk / Secretary Schools and public libraries are wonderful environments for someone who wants calm, purpose, and community. Hours often align with school schedules and the pace is relaxed.
5. Office Manager at a Small Business Her background placing people in jobs + accounting = she already knows how to run an office. Small businesses love experienced, reliable adults for these roles.
A few practical tips to help her get started:
- Update her resume — focus on skills, not just job titles (scheduling, billing, organizing, coordinating)
- LinkedIn profile — even a basic one helps employers find her
- Indeed & ZipRecruiter — filter for part-time or entry-level office roles
- Temp agencies — these are gold for people re-entering the workforce. They place you quickly, no long applications, and it often leads to permanent roles
She has more to offer than she probably realizes. Wishing her the best! 💛
As an Allied Healthcare Worker, I Don’t Understand Why We Still Tie Healthcare to Employment.
This is going to be a long one, so bear with me. I’ve just been doing some reflecting after a tough day at work. Today I witnessed the loss of patients who delayed or avoided care because they couldn’t afford it.
For some odd reason, ever since World War II, the United States has stayed on a system where healthcare benefits are largely tied to employment if you're lucky enough to have a job that offers them. Some employers don’t even provide healthcare coverage at all. My spouse works in the healthcare field, and her employer doesn’t offer health insurance which is why I can’t just leave my job as they are on my insurance.
What’s even stranger is that employer-based healthcare wasn’t originally some carefully designed system. The modern system of employer-sponsored health insurance largely grew out of World War II era wage controls. Because employers couldn’t raise wages to attract workers, many began offering health insurance as a benefit instead. Later tax policies reinforced it, and what started as a wartime workaround slowly became the default system we still use today.
Fast forward to now, and it feels even more disconnected from reality. We live in an economy where companies regularly lay off workers to improve quarterly earnings, reduce labor costs, or boost shareholder returns. That means access to healthcare can disappear overnight, not because someone did anything wrong, but because it helped a balance sheet.
As an allied health professional, I’ve worked inside this system long enough to see how deeply those incentives affect both patients and providers.
I know the usual arguments. People will say universal healthcare means higher taxes. Maybe it does on paper, but we already pay in other ways through premiums, deductibles, copays, surprise bills, and employer contributions that could otherwise go toward wages.
Others will say government shouldn’t be involved. But the government is already deeply involved through Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, tax subsidies, and regulations that shape the entire system. The real debate isn’t whether there’s government involvement, it’s what kind, and for whose benefit.
Some argue America has the best healthcare in the world. We absolutely have incredible doctors, nurses, researchers, and technology. But that’s not the same thing as access. A system isn’t the best if people avoid care, delay treatment, or go into debt to survive it.
Then there’s the idea that people should just work harder to get jobs with benefits. But illness doesn’t care about employment status. People get sick while changing jobs, starting businesses, working part time, caregiving, or between jobs entirely. Healthcare is one of the few things every single person will need regardless of their career path.
I also think it’s worth being honest about incentives. Insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and large healthcare systems all operate within a profit driven structure. I’m not against people being paid well. Doctors, nurses, therapists, techs, and staff absolutely should be. But there is a difference between fair compensation and a system where financial incentives can compete with patient care.
And I want to be very clear about something. This isn’t aimed at healthcare workers. If anything, they are some of the most underappreciated people in the entire system. Doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals are often overworked, understaffed, burned out, and expected to do more with fewer resources while drowning in administrative work. They are trying to provide care inside a system that constantly makes that harder.
The United States spends more on healthcare per person than any other developed country, yet millions of Americans are still uninsured or underinsured. We spend more and still get worse access.
COVID-19 made this even more obvious. A global health crisis exposed how fragile and uneven access to care can be when it is tied to employment, insurance status, and administrative barriers. It highlighted how quickly people can fall through the cracks in a system that isn’t designed for universal coverage.
At the end of the day, I don’t believe healthcare should depend on where you work, whether your employer offers benefits, or whether you happen to be between jobs. Healthcare should follow the person, not the job.
The only real concern I see with government involvement isn’t whether it can work, but how to design it so it’s stable long term, protected from political swings that can weaken or reshape safety nets over time. Any universal system would need strong structural independence and safeguards so it cannot be easily dismantled or undermined depending on who is in power.
Everyone gets sick. Everyone gets injured. Everyone eventually needs care. Nobody should have to choose between life saving treatment and financial ruin.
I don’t think that’s a radical idea. I think it’s a basic standard a this country should be able to meet.
Anyways I am tired. Going to try to sleep. Goodnight people.
Jobadvisor
This is a thoughtful and heartfelt post. A few things stand out worth engaging with:
Where the argument is strongest
The historical point is genuinely underappreciated — employer-sponsored insurance really did emerge from a WWII wage-control workaround, not any deliberate policy design. Building a system around an accident of wartime economics is a strange foundation to defend.
The "system vs. access" distinction is also well made. World-class hospitals and researchers don't help someone who delays a cancer screening because of cost. Those are genuinely different things.
Where it could be challenged
The piece largely rebuts the weakest versions of the counterarguments. The more serious ones would be:
- Transition costs and disruption — moving ~160 million people off employer plans isn't just a tax question; it's a massive structural upheaval with real political and logistical complexity.
- What kind of universal system? — single-payer, multi-payer with mandate, public option — these differ enormously in outcomes and tradeoffs. The post treats "universal coverage" as a single destination.
- Supply-side constraints — universal coverage increases demand. Without addressing physician supply, wait times, and hospital capacity, coverage doesn't automatically equal timely care. Some countries with universal systems struggle here.
The honest core
The writer isn't really making a technocratic policy argument — they're making a moral one: healthcare access shouldn't be contingent on employment status. That's a values claim, and it's a defensible one even if you disagree about the mechanism.
The final caveat about needing structural protections from political swings is actually the most sophisticated part of the piece — and the hardest problem to solve.
What drew you to sharing this?