What's a good get it done and go home job that you don't really have to care about or be very impressive to get?
I have a niche bachelor's degree, and an associates degree, and after getting into the 'real job' world I've found myself missing doing things like retail and stocking (I don't miss restaurants but it was still easier than my current job). I have work ethic, I'm usually intelligent, but my mental health simply does not allow me the ability to have interest in a full career right now. Having to climb the corporate ladder, constantly improve and fight for my spot, and also just particular social aspects of having to push people, having to put away all sense of self and personality in the name of professionalism, all that is just not for me at all. I never felt comfortable in the academic world or corporate world, so I'm stating to think something a bit easier and more manual labor job may be more my speed. Whats a reliable job that I can get done and go home without having to suck my soul out and carry it back home with me?
Jobadvisor
1. Night/Early Morning Retail Stocker or Receiver
- The Work: Unloading delivery trucks, breaking down pallets, organizing inventory in the backroom, and stocking shelves.
- Why it fits: It's task-driven and highly routine. You usually get to put on headphones, listen to podcasts or music, and just move boxes. Once the shift is over, the stock is on the shelves, and you walk away.
- Where to look: Grocery stores, big-box retailers (Target, Home Depot, Lowe's), or distribution centers.
2. Mail / Package Handler or Carrier
- The Work: Sorting mail and packages inside a distribution center, loading trucks, or driving a local delivery route.
- Why it fits: TheIt sounds like you are experiencing classic corporate burnout, and your instinct to trade mental drag for physical task completion is entirely valid. When your job requires constant emotional labor, political maneuvering, and high cognitive load, it leaves zero bandwidth for your actual life.
1. Logistics & Facilities
- Commercial Custodian / Janitor (Night Shift or Institutional):
- Why it fits: Low social interaction, highly routine, and immediately satisfying visible progress. School districts, universities, or local government facilities often offer solid benefits and union stability without high stress.
- The Vibe: Put on headphones or a podcast, follow a set checklist, go home.
- Warehouse Stocker / Material Handler (Non-Amazon):
- Why it fits: You liked stocking; applying that to light industrial warehouses, local distribution centers, or medical supply hubs removes customer-facing friction.
- The Vibe: Move items from Point A to Point B. (Pro-tip: Smaller local distributors or specialized supply companies tend to be much less high-pressure than retail giants).
- Mail Carrier / Postal Clerk (USPS or Regional Courier):
- Why it fits: Once you learn your route or sorting station, the work is automated muscle memory.
- The Vibe: Autonomous work, spending time outdoors or in a quiet processing hub, with zero expectation to climb ladders unless you specifically seek it out.
2. Low-Stress Retail & Public Services
- Public Library Assistant or Page:
- Why it fits: Shelving books, handling holds, and basic front-desk processing. You get the tactile, repetitive nature of retail stocking in a quiet, non-sales environment.
- The Vibe: Low pressure, stable environment, no sales targets or aggressive upselling.
- Specialty Trade Retail (Nursery, Hardware, Craft Supply):
- Why it fits: Plant nurseries and local hardware stores focus heavily on inventory management, watering, and stocking. Customers are usually there for specific projects, not high-volume retail chaos.
- The Vibe: Grounded, task-based work with straightforward customer interactions.
3. Specialized Operations & Administration
- Data Entry / Records Clerk:
- Why it fits: Municipal offices, hospital networks, and legal firms frequently hire people just to convert physical documents into digital files or index records.
- The Vibe: Clear input/output metrics. You don't have to "sell yourself" or push anyone; you just process the queue.
- Groundskeeper / Parks Maintenance:
- Why it fits: Mowing, trail maintenance, edging, and basic facilities upkeep for local city or county parks departments.
- The Vibe: Physical movement outside, clear daily task assignments, and fixed hourly schedules.
How to Approach This Transition
- Leverage "Overqualification" Carefully: Employers for these roles sometimes worry that people with bachelor's degrees will get bored and leave quickly. Frame your resume around reliability: highlight your baseline work ethic, punctuality, and desire for a steady, hands-on role where you can focus on execution.
- Protect Your Boundaries: The main goal here is mental space. Pick a job with clear hourly bounds—avoid salaried roles that quietly expect off-the-clock availability.
- Remember It’s a Tool, Not an Identity: A job doesn't have to be your passion or a statement about your potential. It can simply be the transaction that pays your bills while you protect your mental health and energy for what actually matters to you.
My theory on baby boomers and mass retirement
It wasn’t uncommon for a family during the baby boom was 5-6 kids. That wasn’t out of the norm.
Right now the birth rates are in serious decline. In theory there should be more open and available positions than ever before and not enough workers to fill those positions. They keep saying there will be a mass retiring. Yet millennials and gen z apply to “400+ applications before they get an interview”
My theory is this. The positions that were held by baby boomers are not getting replaced. Once a boomer retires his/her position most likely gets eliminated. Most companies are doing this.
Boomers entered the workforce in the 70s and the same job today takes 1/10 of the manpower it did prior to computers, the internet and AI.
TLDR; Boomers are not hogging good paying jobs. Corporations are eliminating the roles they once held once they retire.
Jobadvisor
You sent this one without a question too, so I'm guessing again. It looks like you're collecting opinions on jobs and the future, which makes sense given your career worries.
The post has a point. Many companies do absorb a retiring person's duties into other roles, or automate them, instead of hiring a replacement. Still, it's a US-centered theory and oversimplified. Some fields really do have retirement gaps, especially skilled trades, healthcare, and teaching. The "400+ applications" problem is mostly about entry-level office jobs, where automated applications and fewer junior roles make competition fierce. And the Philippines is different: it has a young population, so the pressure is more about competition and job quality than a shortage of workers.
For you, the useful part is that jobs requiring hands-on skill, people skills, or licenses are harder to automate or eliminate. Your EIM training counts for something here, and so do things like law, HR, healthcare, and teaching, which depend on human judgment and communication. When your parents say "in demand," that's the kind of job to look for: one where a person is hard to replace.
What do you want to do with these posts? Are you looking for my take on them, or are they making you wonder which careers will still be around when you graduate?
Withdrew my application, they reached back out
I went through 4 rounds of interviews to realize this job is very high stress, no structure, lots of manual work. Not at all worth the $55k salary. All 3 interviews were with upper management, so they were vague about what I'd actually be doing until I got to the 4th. It was a peer interview, and I quickly learned this was not at all what was advertised on the job description. I should've immediately pulled out when they said the dreaded "we're like a family here," but I didn't want to be picky. I withdrew my application, and one of the VPs emailed me saying he was informed I withdrew and wanted to call me. Not asking to discuss why in email but to hop in a zoom and chat. It proved to me that I made the right call because companies usually tell me they understand, and we both respectfully part ways. What this company is doing feels a bit invasive? I guess I should be grateful that a company wants to hire me, but no job is worth my mental health.
Jobadvisor
- Damage Control / Sales Pitch: They know the peer interview exposed the high-stress, unstructured reality of the role, and they want to talk you back into the pipeline before you walk away for good.
- Pressure Tactics: It’s much harder to say "no" to a VP face-to-face on Zoom than it is in a polite email. They are counting on that power dynamic to put you on the spot.
How to handle the email
"Hi [VP Name],Thank you for reaching out. After careful consideration, I’ve decided to move forward in a different direction that aligns better with my current career goals and expectations.I appreciate the time everyone on the team spent speaking with me throughout the process, and I wish [Company Name] all the best.Best regards,[Your Name]"
Why this works
- It is polite and professional, leaving no grounds for anyone to call you unprofessional.
- It does not give specific reasons (like "the pay is too low" or "the peer interview sounded awful"), which prevents them from arguing with you or trying to "fix" the problem on a call.
- It explicitly reiterates that your decision is final.
After 15 years in the workforce, I want to blow my brains out every time I see that experience with a specific system or program is REQUIRED
It just makes me ask so many questions:
- Is the employer unwilling to train someone on their own systems?
- Does the employer think people are dumb and cannot learn from such training?
- Does the employer think that if someone is trained on a system, that same system must carry them the rest of their career? No pivots?
- Do they not understand they are turning away extremely competent individuals who are qualified?
In my FIFTEEN YEARS of experience I have NEVER seen someone take more than a week to be trained on ANY system, especially ones where the system does the exact same shit other systems do.
It just seems like a really anachronistic way of doing a job posting where maybe employers had more leverage in the past, but nowadays its wildly tone deaf.
Jobadvisor
That frustration is legit, and your read on the "same system, different logo" point is mostly right. Here's what I think is actually going on behind those questions.
It's usually not a considered decision. Most "required: experience with X" lines are the hiring manager's wish list, lightly edited by HR, copied from the last posting, and run through an ATS. Nobody sat down and decided that a competent person with Y experience can't learn X. The requirement is a cheap filter, and when a posting gets hundreds of applicants, a cheap filter is appealing even if it throws out good people.
Your leverage take is slightly backwards, I think. In a market where employers get flooded with applications, they have more leverage, and that's exactly when they get lazy and picky. In a tight labor market, you see "willing to train" everywhere. So it's less anachronistic and more a symptom of an employer's market.
There is a kernel of truth, though. Learning the basics of a tool in a week is realistic for most systems. But for some, like SAP, Workday, NetSuite, or a heavily customized Salesforce instance, getting to real proficiency can take months, and the employer is thinking about ramp-up cost, not whether you're smart. That said, for most of the systems people actually see in job posts, you're right that it's the same functionality with a different UI.
The practical upshot is that "required" is often closer to "preferred." If you're strong on everything else, apply anyway and name comparable systems explicitly in your resume and cover letter ("5 years in Asana and Jira, quickly ramped on X-type tools"), since that also helps with the keyword filter. Referrals and direct outreach to hiring managers also bypass the filter entirely.
Is this coming from a current job search? If so, I'm happy to help you reframe your resume so your system experience reads as transferable.
Second chance to tip
Ordered a pizza to pick up from Pizza Hut. Since no one was waiting on me I didn’t see a reason to tip when I paid online.
Got to the store to pick up and she slides me a keypad. “Since you didn’t tip when you ordered, you get another chance.”
I asked “For what? I didn’t have a table or waiter or any cleanup. I did it all myself”
She replied, “yeah, you can choose no tip”
Ya think?!
Jobadvisor
The employee's "yeah, you can choose no tip" is the most honest part of the exchange. The ask is built into the system. The pickup counter has a payment terminal with a tip screen, and the screen is set up to prompt everyone, so she's probably just following what she was told or what the software does by default. The design works, too: businesses that add tip prompts at counters and kiosks see more tips, because asking face to face makes declining feel awkward.
Her answer also gives away how odd the prompt is. Tipping norms are built around service: someone brings you food, refills your drink, or cleans up after you. Picking up a box from a counter is closer to buying something at a store, and most etiquette guides treat a tip there as optional, maybe a few dollars if someone went out of their way. It's reasonable to feel that "second chance to tip" is less a request for payment for a service than a nudge to cover for wages the employer isn't paying. Counter staff at chains like this often do earn low wages, so the pressure isn't coming from nowhere, but that's an argument for the employer to pay more, not for customers to top up every transaction.
Tapping "no tip" and moving on is a perfectly normal response. If you do want to tip, do it because you chose to, not because a screen was slid across the counter.
Rant on Undertime: the bane of salaried workers.
My salaried job views a 40 hour week as a minimum, not an average. I average somewhere between 42-45 hours per week, and my boss thinks that's too low. She doesn't get that people reporting more hours are likely doing just as much or less work, just reporting more.
This month, we are expected to work 40-50 additional hours on top of our regular work. It includes evenings and weekends. My pay stays the same, so each hour worked over 40 basically lowers my "full time" hourly pay. For what I'm making, this workload alone is effectively valuing my labor at an almost $10 per hour pay cut.
I'm working lots of undertime hours this month. Bringing home all of that sweet undertime during the comparatively fewer hours I'm at home.
We complain and what's the response? Generational differences on work ethic. When we ask for flex time or time off during regular hours to compensate? Well our contract gives us generous PTO already so we shouldn't complain. To be clear it does, but that doesn't factor in things like making consistent standing plans and family/home schedules on weeknights and weekends. Soft benefits that any union job should strive to provide.
And here's the kicker, I don't only have a union I work for one!
Side note: undertime is already a word both a different meaning but it's so obscure I'm co-opting it.
Jobadvisor
The math is right, and it's the part managers like to skip. Salary is a fixed price for a fixed expectation, and when the expectation grows, the hourly rate quietly shrinks. If you're already at 42-45 hours and this month adds another 40-50, you're around 54 hours a week, which means your effective rate drops by roughly a quarter. A $10/hour cut is believable for a mid-to-upper salary. And the evenings and weekends cost more than the raw hours suggest, since that's the time that's actually worth something to you.
Your boss's logic is the classic hours-as-proxy-for-effort trap. If she treats 40 as a floor and reads 42-45 as slacking, she's measuring presence rather than output, and she's rewarding people who report inflated hours. You're right that this selects for performative busyness.
The "generational work ethic" line is a deflection. It turns a compensation question into a character question, which conveniently ends the conversation. And the PTO response confuses two different benefits. PTO is a lump of time you schedule in advance. What you're asking for is predictability and the right to recover time when work spills into your evenings and weekends. Generous PTO doesn't help when your standing Tuesday-night plans get eaten.
The union angle is where I'd focus, because it's your best lever. Contracts often have language on hours of work, comp time, or workload that people never read until they need it. If this extra work is coming from management, check what the contract says about expected hours and extra assignments. Even if the contract is silent, a steward can raise it as a collective issue, which carries more weight than individuals complaining one by one. It also helps to keep a simple log of actual hours this month, since "we all worked 52-55 hours for four weeks" is much harder to dismiss as a generational attitude.
And for the record, I think the co-opted "undertime" works. It's more useful than the original meaning.
27, living with grandparents , unemployed, and i have no idea what I’m doing with my life.
I'm 27 and I honestly don't know what the fuck I'm doing with my life right now.
I'm living with my grandparents,I'm unemployed. And I know I can't just keep doing this forever.
I don't want to rely on my family or just sit around waiting for something to happen. I want to actually have my own shit.
But at the same time, I don't really know what I want to do.
I've worked in fast food for about 10 years and I know I don't want to do that forever. I don't want some job that's just gonna beat the shit out of my body either.
I want something I can actually stick with.
Something where I can learn a thing or two and get good at it. And actually want to wake up and be excited to do it
I've been getting really interested in electronics repair and soldering and phones and consoles etc.
I like figuring out why something isn't working and messing with it until I understand it. That’s the main thing I’ve noticed. I like understanding how things work. I do, but I just get caught up in my head
What if I spend all this time learning it and it doesn't go anywhere?
actually taking that interest and turning it into something consistent is where I fuck myself up.I have a hard time following through with things
I'll have these moments where I'm like, Alright, this is it. I'm gonna get my shit together, and I genuinely mean it. But then somehow I'll lose that.
I've also had a pretty complicated relationship with drugs and alcohol, and honestly I think that's played a bigger part in my life than I would've liked.
There have been periods where I've used shit to escape. and sometimes I wonder how much of my motivation, attention, and ability to actually get my life together has been affected by that.
It's something I'm still trying to work through while also trying to figure out the rest of my life. And that's part of why I think I feel so behind sometimes. I know I'm not stupid.
There have been times where I've been in charge of shit and handled it.So it's not like I don't think I'm incapable of doing anything. It's more like I can't seem to get myself moving in one direction long enough to actually do it
I’m 27 and I know that's not old.
But it feels old when you're sitting at home unemployed and you don't have much of a plan.
I look at other people my age and it seems like everyone has some kind of direction.
People have careers.
Their own places.
Money.
Relationships.
Plans.
And I'm sitting here thinking, "What the fuck am I doing?"
I know comparing myself to everybody else isn't helpful.
But it's hard not to.
Especially when I know I don't want to still be doing this a few years from now.
And there's other shit I've had to deal with too.
My childhood was pretty chaotic.
I've had addiction around me.
I've lost people.
I've had my own problems with substances.
I've spent a lot of time trying to understand myself and why I do certain things.
And I've been trying to get myself into a better place with all of that.
So sometimes I wonder if I'm just behind because I've spent so much of my life trying to deal with shit that other people didn't have to deal with.
But then another part of me is like, "Okay, well, that's the past. What are you gonna do now?"
And that's where I get stuck again.
Because I don't think I need some giant revelation about my purpose.
I don't think I need to suddenly figure out my entire life.
I just want to fucking move.
I want a job.
I want my own money.
I want to learn something useful.
I want to have something I'm actually proud of.
I want to stop feeling like I'm waiting for my life to start.
And honestly, that's probably what bothers me the most.
I don't think I'm hopeless.
I don't think I'm incapable.
I think I'm stuck.
And I'm getting really fucking tired of being stuck.
Jobadvisor
You're not as stuck as it feels. You've named what you want (a job, your own money, something to be proud of), you've found a real interest, and you've spotted your own sticking point. That's more direction than it seems like from the inside.
The interest is a good one. Electronics repair isn't a dead end, because the underlying skills (troubleshooting, soldering, reading a board, patience with small stuff) show up in a lot of jobs: phone and console repair shops, Geek Squad-type roles, field service tech, electronics assembly and rework, and biomedical equipment tech, which tends to pay well, is steady, and is easy on the body. A community college certificate or associate's is a common route into that last one. So "what if it doesn't go anywhere?" has a decent answer: the skill transfers even if the first path changes.
Test it cheaply before committing. A basic soldering kit and a couple of broken phones or controllers off eBay or a thrift store costs under $50 or so. Spend a few weeks fixing things and watching repair channels, and you'll learn fast whether you actually love it. That's a small experiment, not a life decision.
Get income moving at the same time. Don't wait to be "ready." Your decade in fast food is real experience, and "has been in charge and handled it" is exactly what a repair shop or electronics retailer wants at the counter. A job in that world also lets you learn on the clock. It doesn't have to be the destination, just a step that points the right direction.
On follow-through, the "this is it, I'm getting my shit together" moments usually fail because the plan is too big for the mood to carry. Shrink it until it's almost embarrassingly small: 20 minutes at the bench, one application a day, one repair a week. Then borrow structure from the outside, since a class, a job schedule, or a deadline carries you on the days motivation doesn't. Missing a day isn't failure; it's just a day.
On substances, you're right that they can quietly drain motivation and focus. I wouldn't treat that as separate from the plan. If you're still using, or it's a struggle to stay on track, support like a counselor, a peer group, or a program can be part of getting unstuck rather than a detour from it. You've clearly done a lot of self-reflection already, and that counts.
If it'd help, I can sketch a concrete 30-day plan with you: what to buy, what to practice, and which kinds of jobs to apply to. What's realistically available near you, like community colleges or repair shops, or is it mostly online options?
Companies should go back to asking for mail-in resumes.
This would reduce the amount of applications from spam appliers and bots. It takes more time to print and mail in a resume, so candidates would be more selective about the jobs they applied to.
An easy application process can paradoxically make it harder to get a job, because low effort leads to high volume. It's similar to Braess's paradox, which you might know through that "one more lane will fix it" meme.
It would ease the burden on hiring managers, who wouldn't have to review as many applications. Also, there's evidence suggesting paper has a higher memory retention rate than screens, so a hiring manager going through a stack of physical resumes is going to remember more about each candidate anyways.
Less competition means a higher signal-to-noise ratio, so it would be easier for qualified candidates to stand out. So the 10 extra minutes it would take to mail in a resume would be well worth it.
Jobadvisor
The core idea holds up: when applying costs nothing, volume explodes and the signal of "this person actually wants this job" disappears. Economists call this costly signaling, and there's real evidence that capping or pricing applications improves matching. In some job-market experiments, applicants got a small fixed number of "I'm especially interested" signals to send, and employers paid attention to them. A mail-in requirement would also wipe out bots almost entirely.
I'd quibble with a few of the supporting points, though. Braess's paradox is about adding capacity to a network and making everyone's trip slower because of how individuals route themselves. The "one more lane" meme is really induced demand, which is related but not the same. The comparison still works loosely for applications, since easier applying induces more applying, but it's not quite Braess. The paper-retention research is also mostly about reading long texts for comprehension. It's a stretch to say a hiring manager would remember a one-page resume better because it's printed, especially after they've been through a stack of 200.
The bigger problem is who the filter would catch. Mailing a resume costs more than 10 minutes once you count printing, an envelope, a stamp, and a trip to a mailbox. That's trivial if you have a home printer and a free evening, and a real barrier if you don't, if you're working two jobs, or if you live somewhere with unreliable mail. It would screen for resources and logistics rather than interest or ability. Mail delays would also push the hiring process back, and many employers would still have to scan everything, since they're legally required to retain applicant records in many cases.
I also think the spam-applying problem is partly employers' own doing. People mass-apply because response rates are abysmal, ghost postings are common, and ATS filters toss good candidates, so applying to 100 jobs is the rational response. Fix the black hole and some of the volume would fix itself.
If the goal is friction that tests interest without hurting people who lack resources, there are cheaper options: a short, specific written question about the role, an application cap per person, or a small skills task. Those cost the applicant a little thought rather than postage, and they're much harder for bots to fake. A modest version of your idea is probably right. The physical mail part is where it falls apart.