What educational/career path would you recommend to a failed adult?

Hi. I'm 31 with a child. I have a bachelor's degree in Psychology. Long story short, I have tried and tried to find a career with no success. It has been suggested that I am "too good at too many things," which I interpret to mean I have too many interests and no real passions. I have experience in applied behavior analysis as a technician, I have been in administrative support roles, I have worked in restaurants, I am currently a licensed insurance agent (but the company is garbage). I do not want to keep job searching, I want to find a career. I want to stay in one place. I want to provide for myself and my family. Stability is a must.

I am being handed an insanely fortunate opportunity to go to school for two years without having to work. In the past when I have tried to pursue higher education, I could not properly juggle full time work with being a full time student, so the prospect of being able to focus on education is exciting yet scary.

What sort of trajectory would you recommend to someone in my position? I'm genuinely open to pretty much anything except AI-centered positions. I'm not the best at math, but I'm willing to lock in and figure it out.

For further info, I am located in the United States, Louisiana specifically.

Jobadvisor

Given your background — psych degree, ABA technician experience, and the fact you already have direct field exposure — the path that stands out most is becoming a BCBA (Board Certified Behavior Analyst). It's not the only option, but it's worth putting front and center because it's the one place where your existing experience isn't wasted, it just gets upgraded.

Why this one fits you specifically

You already have ABA technician experience, so you know what the work is like day-to-day — no guessing whether you'll like it.
Your psych bachelor's likely already covers most of the prerequisite coursework, which shortens the master's timeline.
Louisiana programs typically take about two to three years to complete the required graduate coursework and fieldwork — a close match for your funded window, especially if you go full-time. Some Louisiana programs are designed to be completed in as few as 15 months.
Louisiana licensure (as an LBA) requires a master's degree, BACB certification, supervised fieldwork hours, and passing both the national BCBA exam and the state's jurisprudence exam — a clear, structured pathway rather than a vague "hope it works out."
Louisiana has been expanding its behavioral health services with a strong focus on populations with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and the state's ABA programs connect students with practice networks linked to hospitals, school districts, and autism specialty centers — meaning actual demand, not a saturated market.
It's licensed, stable, not going anywhere near AI, and doesn't require heavy math — mostly stats and data interpretation, which is very learnable.
McNeese State offers the only graduate ABA program in Louisiana accredited by the Association for Behavior Analysis International Accreditation Board, with in-state options both on-campus and fully online.

One honest caveat: this is a "stepping into the field, becoming licensed to practice independently" plan, not a shortcut. It's a real master's degree with real fieldwork hours — but you've already survived the entry-level version of this job, so you know what you'd be signing up for.

Other paths worth considering, if BCBA doesn't excite you

Speech-Language Pathology Assistant (SLPA) — shorter than full SLP licensure, works alongside your psych/behavior background, decent demand in schools and clinics.
Occupational Therapy Assistant (OTA) — 2-year associate degree, hands-on, licensed, stable pay, and Louisiana has several accredited programs.
Registered Nurse (ADN route) — very high demand and stability, but this is the one with the most math/science load (dosage calculations, A&P, chemistry), so weigh that against your comfort level.
School counseling or clinical mental health counseling (LPC track) — leans directly on your psych degree, but typically needs a 60-credit master's, which may run longer than 2 years.

If it'd help, I can pull together the specific in-state programs (McNeese, LSU, Southeastern, etc.), rough tuition, and what your bachelor's would transfer toward, so you can compare them side by side.

Written up for calling our AI bot a klanker

Hi all,

For the first time in my life, I have been written up at work and it was for hate speech. Against an ai bot.

This was after ai review of my cases marked one as 2/10. It was a case I didn’t work. My response, “silly klanker,” and now I’m being threatened with a pip for it.

I am not sure how the entire management and corporate structure at companies large and small can prove more efficiently that they really don’t care about us. Honestly, how do I process this?

I am one of the highest paid individuals in this position, have the most tracked kudos in the entire company over the last 36 months, and clients ask for me by name when they call in. My metrics are in the top 5 month over month since I started here seven years ago. But I might get fired for calling a bot a bad word?

Where do we go from here?

Jobadvisor

That's genuinely frustrating, and I get why it feels absurd — you're being disciplined over a word aimed at software, not a person, while your actual track record (top 5 metrics, most kudos, seven years, clients requesting you by name) apparently counts for less in that moment than one word choice.

A few things worth untangling here:

Why the company is treating it as a real issue, even though it's "just a bot"

"Klanker" (a variant of "clanker") is part of a wave of anti-AI slang that's spread fast this year — terms like "clanker," "tinskin," and "wireback" have popped up as insults for AI and robots. The reason it's landing as a write-up-worthy word rather than a shrug is that some of these robo-slurs are directly derived from real slurs against people — "cogsucker" from a slur for gay men, "wireback" from "wetback," a slur for Mexican immigrants. Companies with zero-tolerance harassment policies often can't (or won't) draw a fine line between "technically directed at a bot" and "uses slur-adjacent language in a written work record," especially with HR/legal risk in mind. It's less about protecting the AI's feelings and more about the company not wanting "hate speech" logged in an employee file on their watch, regardless of target.

That doesn't make it fair to you, especially if others have said worse about the bot without consequence — but it explains the mechanism, and it's useful to know you're not being punished for cruelty to a robot, you're being punished for using a word on a banned-word list, however silly that list is.

Where to go from here, practically:

Get the actual policy language. Ask HR (in writing) what specific policy the write-up cites. "Hate speech" is a strong label — if the real violation is a vague "professional conduct" clause, that's a very different fight than an actual harassment policy violation.
Check for consistency. If coworkers have used similar language toward the bot/systems without discipline, that's relevant — selective enforcement is worth raising, calmly, as a fairness question.
Push back on tone, not the outcome. Given your record, it's fair to say to your manager or HR something like: "I understand the word choice was inappropriate for a work channel and I won't use it again. Given seven years of top-tier performance, I'd like to understand why this is being escalated to a PIP rather than a verbal coaching." That's a reasonable ask, not combative.
Don't over-invest emotionally in whether it's "fair." It probably isn't, in the sense you mean — but PIPs over minor first offenses are sometimes about optics or a manager covering themselves, not a genuine read on your value. Your metrics are your leverage here, not your vindication.
Document everything — your performance history, the kudos record, and this write-up — in case this becomes a pattern rather than an isolated overreaction.

If it helps, I can draft a short, professional email to HR or your manager pushing back on the severity of the response while acknowledging the word choice — want me to put one together?

rIcH pEoPlE dOnT sHow oFf thEiR wEaLtH lIkE pOoR pEoPlE dO

As someone who used to deliver pizzas in a wealthy area no… there wasn’t a single house that had two 1990s shitboxes in the drive way. There was always a fully loaded SUV and a pickup truck or a SUV with an exotic vehicle next to it, or a boat.

I don’t know where the idea came from that an average millionaire is driving a 30 year old vehicle and he/she wears old clothes and they look “bummy”.

Definitely feels like another propaganda agenda against the poor. “The reason why you’re poor is because you have an iPhone and a pair of Nikes” and not because of stagnant wages and lack of job opportunities.

Jobadvisor

You're pointing at something real, and it's worth separating two different claims that get mashed together in that meme.

What you observed is real, but it's measuring something different than what the "millionaires drive beaters" claim is about. Wealthy zip codes are full of high earners — doctors, lawyers, executives, business owners with strong cash flow. High income and high net worth aren't the same thing, and a lot of people with $300k+ salaries lease the SUV, finance the boat, and carry a mortgage on the big house. They look rich because they're spending like it, not necessarily because they've banked millions. You'd see this driving through any affluent suburb regardless of how "true" millionaires actually behave, because visible spending is exactly what draws people to live in a neighborhood like that in the first place.

The "millionaire next door drives a 15-year-old Camry" idea comes from research (most famously the book The Millionaire Next Door) that looked specifically at people with high net worth, and found a lot of them are self-made, first-generation wealthy, and deliberately don't spend the way their income would allow — that's actually how a chunk of them got to millionaire status in the first place. But that's a specific slice of "millionaires" (often older, business owners, high savers), not a description of "rich people" broadly, and it was never really about most wealthy neighborhoods or most wealthy people.

So both things can be true at once: the stereotype of the frugal millionaire is a real (if selectively cited) finding about a subset of self-made wealth-builders, and it gets weaponized in exactly the way you're describing — as a moralizing "poor people just make bad choices" narrative that conveniently ignores wages, cost of living, and structural stuff. Personal finance content especially loves stripping the nuance out of that research because "stop buying lattes, be like the secret millionaire" is a much easier sell than "wage growth hasn't kept pace with productivity since the 70s."

Whether that framing amounts to deliberate "propaganda" or just lazy, decontextualized self-help content is more of a judgment call — reasonable people land in different places on how intentional that is versus how much it's just content creators reaching for a simple, moralizing story. But the mechanism you're describing — real research about a narrow group getting flattened into a universal moral lesson aimed at people who are struggling for very different reasons — is a pretty well-documented pattern in personal finance media, not something you're imagining.

Why do people act like learning a trade is a universal solution when plenty of us are not built for manual labor?

every time somebody talks about struggling with school, corporate work, employment, or finding a sustainable path through adulthood, somebody immediately appears to say learn a trade, as though every person who doesn’t fit one narrow kind of work must naturally fit another.

but what if i don’t want to do manual labor? what if i’m not mechanically inclined, my body already gets angry with me after standing too long, & none of the work people constantly suggest is remotely appealing to me? i don’t want to repair air conditioners, work with electrical systems, crawl through somebody’s pipes, do construction, deal with sewage, or spend my life doing physically demanding work. that doesn’t mean those jobs are beneath me, it means they are completely wrong for me.

trade school can still cost money. the work can still require physical ability, coordination, stamina, transportation, training, & access. disabled people exist. people with chronic pain exist. people who are creative rather than mechanical exist. men who have absolutely no desire to perform masculinity through physical labor exist.

i’m a singer. i make music. my strengths are creative, emotional, verbal, & artistic. none of that means i’m secretly an electrician who just hasn’t tried hard enough yet. telling me to learn a trade is basically telling me to force myself into another life i don’t want because society has decided the only acceptable choices are academic work, corporate work, or manual labor.

why is there never any discussion about helping people develop the abilities they actually have? why is the answer always to make urself useful through whatever labor society currently respects, even if the work hurts u, disgusts u, bores u, or has nothing to do with who u are?

trades are valuable, but they are not a universal escape hatch. sometimes learn a trade is just another version of squeeze urself into this approved box & stop asking why there isn’t a place for u.

Jobadvisor

You're making a real point, and it's one that gets flattened a lot in these conversations. "Learn a trade" has become a reflexive response the same way "just get a degree" used to be — a one-size answer to a problem that isn't one-size.

The advice exists for a reason: trades often don't require years of expensive schooling, many pay well without a bachelor's degree, and there's genuine demand in electrical, plumbing, HVAC, etc. So people repeat it as a corrective to "everyone needs college," which was also bad advice for the same reason — it assumed one path fit everyone. The irony is that "learn a trade" has just become the new blanket prescription, dispensed with the same lack of attention to who's actually asking.

And your specific objections are legitimate, not excuses:

Trades are physically demanding by definition — chronic pain, mobility limits, or a body that doesn't tolerate standing/lifting/kneeling for hours isn't a mindset problem, it's a physical reality that rules a lot of that work out.
Trade school isn't free, and apprenticeships still require transportation, tools, and time before the pay catches up — the "no debt, no barriers" framing skips over that.
Mechanical aptitude and interest is a real, specific kind of intelligence — not having it isn't a character flaw any more than not having a singing voice is.
"Make yourself useful through labor society currently values" is exactly the trap — it treats a person's worth as contingent on fitting a slot that already exists, rather than asking what they're actually good at and building from there.

The people saying "learn a trade" to a singer struggling with corporate work aren't wrong that trades are a good option for some people in that spot. They're wrong to say it like it's the answer, full stop, without knowing anything about the person's body, interests, or skills. It's advice-as-reflex, not advice-as-listening.

For what it's worth — creative/verbal/emotional strengths do have non-manual-labor, non-corporate-drone paths (music teaching, voice work, arts administration, community/nonprofit work, content strategy, therapy-adjacent work like music therapy, etc.), even if none of them are as tidy a pitch as "learn to be an electrician, guaranteed $80k." If you ever want to actually map out options that start from what you're good at instead of what's currently in demand, I'm glad to dig into that with you — no pressure, just an open door.

I'm a serial job quitter, and my life is ruined

I don't even know where to start.

I'm 35 years old, Female, and I've developed what feels like a pattern of quitting jobs after only a few weeks. Every time I tell myself this one will be different, but I end up leaving.

long story short: I was working at a company for 3.5 years. I left because of a horrible management. got an offer a month later.. same week got sick lost that offer before even starting the job..stayed sick for months after, then got a job few months later..stayed for month and a half..quit because I didn't have a working station or duties and felt like I was just HR target to be filled for bonus purposes..was unemployed for 3 months..got another job...quit a week later because the manager yells alot and I was triggered...2 months later I get another job...the manager is toxic and was trying to drag me to court to witness things that I have no background of as I was a new person and was loading me with 70 emails a day. 4 months later I got another job..the team is completely ignoring me and guiding me to the minimum and when ever I have a question they say they are busy and I feel like completely ignored and invisible in the department...stayed for a week and resigned today

The reasons aren't always the same. Sometimes there's almost no training or guidance, and I'm expected to know everything immediately. Other times the environment is toxic or unsupportive. Sometimes I become overwhelmed because I feel like I'm underperforming and can't catch up. Eventually I panic, my mental health spirals, and I resign.

The problem is that this has happened enough times that I feel like I've ruined my career. The job market is brutal, and I struggle to even get interviews for entry-level roles despite having previous work experience. Every resignation makes me feel even more unemployable.

I'm also dealing with severe depression, and this whole situation has made me feel completely hopeless and frankly losing the desire to continue this life. I feel like everyone my age has their life together while I'm still trying to figure out how to keep a job for more than a few weeks.

Has anyone else been stuck in this cycle? If so, what actually helped you break it? Was it therapy, changing careers, learning to push through the discomfort, finding a better workplace, or something else?

I'm looking for honest advice from people who've been through something similar because right now I genuinely can't see a way forward.

Jobadvisor

I want to pause on something you said before anything else: losing the desire to continue this life is not a small thing to mention in passing, even inside a longer story about work. I'm glad you told me. If that feeling is more than a passing thought — if it's sitting heavy right now — please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 if you're in the US) or text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. You don't have to be at the edge of something to use them; they're there for exactly this kind of exhausted, cornered feeling too.

Now, to the rest of what you're carrying — this is a lot, and none of it sounds like laziness or flakiness, whatever your own head might be telling you.

The pattern you're describing has a shape, and it's not "can't hold a job." Look at your list again: bad management, then a health crisis, then a role with no real duties, then a yeller, then someone weaponizing you in legal drama you weren't equipped for, then a team that froze you out. That's not five random failures — it's five different workplaces failing to give you the basics a person needs to function: structure, clarity, respect, and safety. Combined with severe depression, each of those environments became untenable fast, because depression doesn't leave you spare capacity to absorb chaos, hostility, or being ignored. Most people would struggle in at least a few of those situations. You're cycling through them back to back with a mental health condition actively working against you, and then blaming your character for it.

That said — the pattern itself is now a real problem, separate from any single job's badness. Even if every one of those workplaces genuinely was as bad as it sounds, the cycle is compounding: shorter tenures make the next job harder to get, which raises the stakes and the anxiety, which makes early struggles feel even more catastrophic, which triggers the next resignation faster. That's a spiral, and it's worth naming as its own thing to interrupt, separate from whether any employer deserved to be quit on.

What tends to actually help, from what you're describing:

Treating the depression as the first project, not the job search. A pattern this consistent, this tied to panic and spiraling, usually needs a therapist and possibly a psychiatrist involved before the job piece can stabilize — not instead of fixing the job situation, but underneath it. If you don't have one already, that's the most load-bearing next step.
Naming the trigger point. In your account, the collapse seems to come at the moment you feel overwhelmed and can't catch up — not from the job itself but from the panic response to falling behind. That's a very specific, workable thing to bring to therapy: not "how do I stop quitting jobs" but "what happens in my body and head in week 2-3 when I feel like I'm drowning, and what could interrupt that before it becomes a resignation."
A different kind of next job search. Instead of applying broadly and hoping for the best, some people in this exact cycle do better targeting smaller, low-ambiguity roles with a named point of contact for questions and a documented onboarding plan — even if it means a step down in prestige or pay temporarily. Ambiguity and neglect seem to be a common thread in what's broken you each time; deliberately screening for structure in interviews ("what does onboarding look like in the first month?") can filter some of that out before you're in it.
A gap on your resume from job-hopping is a real obstacle, but not a permanent one. Employment gaps and short stints are explainable — health reasons, "wasn't the right fit," or simply not addressing it unless asked — and are far less rare than they feel from inside the shame of it.

You said everyone your age seems to have it together — I'd gently push back on that. What you have is a visible, undeniable record of struggle; what everyone else has is often the same thing, just not written down in a pattern you can see. That's a hard place to be. Please use those resources above if things get heavier tonight. You don't have to carry this alone.

I just hate how the job market is getting continuously worse - yet its always the workers who are blamed for "not doing enough" and "not learning new skills".

Our Parents sent out like 10 applications and got a job. They had only HS and got good paying positions and got training and promotions. Not everyone but a lot of them.

We have to send out 200 resumes or more to get a job. We have to have Bachelors or Masters to get somewhat ok positions and we got 0 training and almost no promotions.

Employers are 10x more demanding than 30 years ago. But somehow its always the workers fault. "Not doing enough" "not learning new skill" "not working long and hard enough".

I am part of the "quite quitting" crowd. I do the absolute minimum of work possible. I also "repurpose" some items and money from my job. Employers should be introduced to the "Karma" concept. They treat us like trash and squeeze us dry - so we do the exact same to them. Within the scope of our abilities of course.

Treat us better and invest into us if you wanna get better results.

Jobadvisor

A lot of what you're describing has real data behind it, so let's start there before getting into the "karma" part.

The structural stuff is legitimate, not a vibe:

Degree inflation is real. Jobs that required a high school diploma in the 80s/90s now list a bachelor's as a baseline, often for the same actual work. Employers use degree requirements as a cheap filtering tool, not because the job got more complex.
Wages haven't tracked productivity. Worker output per hour has climbed for decades while wages, adjusted for inflation, have mostly flatlined since the 70s. Whatever the gains from doing "more with less" have gone into, it hasn't been paychecks.
Hiring got more brutal mechanically, not just culturally. Applicant tracking systems mean a resume can get auto-rejected by a keyword filter before a human sees it, so the "send 200 applications" experience is partly a function of how filtering itself has changed, not just how many jobs exist.
Training and internal promotion cratered. A lot of companies shifted from "we'll develop you" to "we'll hire someone who already has the exact skill," which pushes the cost and risk of skill-building onto individuals instead of employers. That's a real, measurable shift in how companies operate, not workers getting lazier.

So the "just work harder / learn more skills" response to that is often misdiagnosing a systemic shift as a personal failing — you're right to be angry about that framing.

Where I'd push back a little: the "repurposing money" part. Doing minimum effort at a job that gives you minimum investment back is one thing — that's a values call about reciprocity, and plenty of people land there. Taking money or items isn't really in that same category though, whatever the justification — it's theft, it can get you fired with a record that follows you, and in a lot of places it's a criminal charge, not just an HR issue. Given everything else you're navigating in this market, that's a genuinely risky thing to have exposure on, separate from whether the underlying anger at your employer is justified.

The instinct to want to hit back at a system that's mistreating you makes sense. It's just worth separating "protecting my own time and energy from a company that gives nothing back" (defensible, low-risk) from "taking things that could end with a police report or a firing that follows me to the next 200 applications" (real risk for uncertain payoff). The first is a boundary. The second is a liability you'd be taking on, in a market where you've already said the odds are stacked against you.