I'm assuming you're not rich, so the first thing is: get a job. Start to work and saving what you can. It's important to keep moving to keep the inertia going and not stall in a place where you're completely broke.

What job? Whatever. Do Uber. Do McDonalds. Look for something. Get experience. Forget about dreams. They are useless and overrated. In the process of doing jobs, be curious. Spend the energy you would spend on dreaming into observing. You will find quickly what you like and what you hate. If the job is not for you get out and find another one. Go towards things you like, feel comfortable and feel capable doing.

While doing it ask yourself "What's next?", followed by "How?". I'm working in car shop cleaning and organizing, what's next? Fixing cars looks interesting, maybe I should try that? How? I'll try to learn from these guys and do courses. What's next? I may get a job fixing cars. Great, I know how to fix cars, they hired me and I like it. What's next? Maybe having my own shop? How? You get the idea.

Keep a diary. It's hard because it feels ridiculous. Like a teenager rambling about feelings. I still hate doing it to this day, and I'm 50. But it gives me insights about things I'm doing, because it helps you to see patterns in your behaviour. Like quitting when things were too hard to do because the noise in my head was unbearable and I had this depression that would not quit and I felt I as an alien around people and maybe I should do therapy and HOLY FUCK I'm autistic and that's why EVERYTHING was so hard. The knowledge you may gain doing a diary is unvaluable. Do it the way you feel comfortable (or less painful) to do - physical notebook, computer, tablet, whatever.

In short: keep on moving, be curious, be self-reflective.

That's all what I have for now, good luck!

Good career advice in this thread.

I'm just going to kick in: Get on the Eightfold Path. I wish I would have started as a teen. But, ya know, that's not the way it happened, so🤷.

Good luck! Seek to create joy always!

Being intentional about it can help. A handful of suggestions I don't see in the top replies.

Volunteer: If there are any causes which you think are definitely good, find a local chapter (even something related) and show up! See what you can do for them. Make a friend and learn a bit about what they find fulfilling/interesting.

Travel and talk: If you've got money put aside, I might suggest a larger trip through (EU, US, broader culture, etc). You want to take a long train and talk with others traveling, see what they're working on, hear how their lives have gone. Ask about their time after high school. See some historical sites, some art, and some local foods.

Local events: Check out the programming at a local library, pub, etc. Go to several things and see what's happening!

Consider reading something like atomic habits (or in its genre); dreams aren't terribly effective for doing things. Things get done because they're important to who you are. If there's a kind of person you want to be, focus on doing little things that reinforce that image.

Try a few jobs until you find the least-worse one.

I didn't know what I wanted to do until I was well in my 30s. Prior to that, I worked at a very big retail bank and worked from a teller to a regional manager with over 220 stores under me.

You know what. I fucking hated every moment of that job.

I quit after my mom passed and they gave me 2 weeks off and then I was back into the grind.

I took 1 year off and decided to go into tech. The one place I enjoyed doing on my spare time.

I got my first tech job at 36. And since then have owned my own company and worked for big corporate companies.

You sorta have to try things and hate things before you know what you want.

Take random jobs.

Take random courses. (College or vocational)

A lot of people stumble into their carrers. Don't sweat it to much if you don't have to.

There's value in working a job and realizing it is not what you want to do as well. I did that for 10 years before I realized that I want to do something else instead and that I didn't like having a boss either.

Ok this one is hard

1. Don’t sweat it, you have time. I only discovered what I was good at(and had fun to do) late in life.
2. work and/or study. Find shit job, they build character. They’re hard, they stinks, you’ll hate them. That’s life but that’s also part of the process. They’re probably low cost school in your area, take stupid course, art, programming, another language, etc. Don’t do nothing
3. open a saving account doesn’t matter how little you put in their but it’s a start
4. have fun

I'm in my 30's and still don't know what the fuck I want to do most of the time. Just do what makes you happy in your free time and what makes you money for work. If you can make those things overlap, fantastic. But I've always found that doing what I love for money makes me love it less. Don't put too much pressure on yourself to get it all figured out. Noone has it all figured out by the time they die, and it's not worth wasting your time worrying instead of living.

Be good to yourself and others and you'll have few regrets.

Just try things. You'll figure out what you like/don't like fairly quickly and you might stumble into something you absolutely love.

You know, there’s this little shared but ever so prevalent fact about life: Not many know what they are doing. If anyone. You adapt and you try your best and things happen one way or another. You don’t have that much overall agency or the needed level of deeper understanding or foresight to control most things. You control what you can, endlessly despair over the things you can’t and still ever try and fail to control them, and at the end of the day you try your best to make it all make sense.

Some might even convince themselves that they are on top of it all. There are very few that genuinely are. Most of us don’t know what the hell we are doing and somehow stay afloat. Some better than others. I for one struggle.

I’m approaching middle age and genuinely have zero idea what is going on or what to do with my life.

Somehow things still work out mostly. Life is good. Good enough, that is.

All to say: try not to worry about this too much. You will just waste effort and energy trying to grasp on something even the best of us genuinely struggle with and only select few ever grasp. And those are mostly nepobabies. And the fact they grasp it, is mostly the endless opportunities they get to fail and try again with the safety net and resources they just have at hand.

Unless you have that kind of resources, just try your best to balance your passions, things that bring joy, and then time spent making some board member somewhere a fuck ton of money while getting scraps yourself. You need those scraps, the system is mostly shit, but the happiness is in understanding and accepting the chaos of it all. Not trying too much. You’ll just disappoint yourself.

Don’t expect to know what you want to do as in with your life. Try your best to focus and find joy in the things you know you want to do, as in individual actions. Then tolerate the time and energy you have to spend for someone else to get wealthy in order to sustain those little joys.

Eventually you’ll end up in a place that feels like home and where you have some clarity and purpose. Until then, you’ll think you’ve found them, you’ll fail, you’ll stumble and pick yourself up again, and that’s life.

The best you can do is just go with the flow and trust in what you know: yourself. Find happinesses, however small, and embrace them. Accept the rest for what it is. Mostly necessities to stay afloat to get with the small joys you know and want.

That’s the most any of us can do, unless we are born with a very rare set of skills, quirks or temperaments, or a golden spoon up our as. Seeing as the vast majority of us aren’t, you likely aren’t either. So don’t try to act like you do. You’ll just get depressed, suffer to no end, trying to fit a mold you were never going to fit.

People are advising about choosing a career and interests, but I think it's a good idea to start by thinking about your relationship to the economy and capitalism and how you want to contend with it. Are you ok with working for the rest of your life? What types of work would you be able to tolerate or be able to enjoy, if any? What are your preferences and priorities with regards to how you are perceived, standard of living, family aspirations, financial security, where you will live? What advantages or disadvantages do you already have going for you? What assumptions are you making about what is financially possible, and could you be wrong? If you aren't sure of these things about yourself, how could you find out? It's worth trying new things to learn about the world.

This stuff is important, because there is more than what type of work you end up doing to what the shape of your life will be like.

i struggled with this after high school too. i hated school so much all i could think about was getting out so i never planned anything for my future. ended up doing community college for a few years before choosing a degree to get kinda randomly just to get away from home. after graduating it turned out i hated the work and i decided i needed a change, which brings me to the part that might help you.

when it came down to actually deciding what to do with my future i sat down and asked myself, if i could do literally anything i wanted, like life was an open world rpg video game and all i had to do was pick something i wanted and go for it, what would i do? completely ignore what other people might think, or what they might expect from you, or whether what you want is hard as fuck, or even whether you think you can do it or not. the main thing is to get to the unfiltered truth of what you want, deep down. where you go from there is up to you, but if you can figure out what you really want im guessing youll find the motivation to make it happen.

when i did this for myself it felt so liberating. i settled on space exploration, which is pretty broad, and wound up deciding to go back to school to study engineering. it was honestly terrifying because id never even done calculus and if it didnt work out i didnt know how i was going to live, but im really glad i did because it all worked out.

hopefully this helps you. just remember the most important thing is to be honest with yourself.

I wouldn't stress too much about finding "the perfect fit" or some so-called dream job. Plenty of us work jobs that are tolerable and just pay the bills and use that money for our own enjoyment on the weekends. You'll probably have to wade through some shit jobs for shit pay before you get there though.

School unfortunately does a pretty bad job preparing folks for what comes after. You go from a strictly regulated lifestyle where you are given very little freedom to a lifestyle you have to construct on your own.

The best way to figure things out is to give it a try. Maybe you saw a flyer for a trivia night and that vaguely interests you? Give it a try. Did a video about making a ship in a bottle catch your eye? Give it a try. Did you see someone having a really good time riding a skateboard and idly wonder if it'd be fun? Give it a try.

You shouldn't feel bad on trying stuff and not continuing with them after a bit. That just means you weren't really into that thing as much as you thought you might be.

A lot of the stuff you try might not be for you. I found out that I hate trivia at bars through personal experience. But that's ok, cuz I also found out I love karaoke at bars when the karaoke crowd came in after trivia. You'll meet people you like. You'll meet people you dislike. You'll meet people you are largely ambivalent about. It might take awhile, but you should only move at your own pace. Don't worry about other people and stay focused on yourself.

Something important to learn is that you should not be defined by your job. Your job is just something you do to pay the bills. If you are lucky, you'll have a job that you like and is personally fulfilling, but that's pretty rare in this day and age. You are much more likely to find happiness and fulfillment outside your job.

Try to enjoy the little things in life. I have been trying to make the perfect breakfast for a few years now as a way to get myself to enjoy waking up in the morning. Stack up your little joys and hopefully, you'll have enough joy for the entire day. Maybe even enough joy to share with others.

Much like exercise, there's no real shortcut to self-actualization. You'll need to do a lot of experimentation to find what you like an enjoy. I would recommend finding a consumptive hobby and a constructive hobby. You most likely already have tried a bunch of consumptive hobbies, as our society encourages consumption. If you haven't I would highly recommend experimenting with constructive hobbies, where you make stuff. It doesn't have to be drawing art, it can be stuff like working with wood, assembling models, writing reviews to bad movies. Anything where you add something to the world that didn't exist before. Consumptive hobbies I enjoy are reading books and eating cookies. Constructive hobbies I enjoy are making linoprints and baking cookies.

Your fears and doubts are ones that countless humans have experienced. They overcame those doubts and I'm sure you can too. You are not alone in your struggles and if things ever get too tough, there are always people willing to lend you a hand.

Good luck, buddy.

Don't beat yourself up for not having a plan. You're not an aberration in society. The people who plan everything are just the loudest so we think that's the norm. Sooner or later, out of necessity or love, you'll hit upon an idea that you'll pursue.

tldr: exercise, learn to cook, and start saving some money (keep your expenses low as long as you can)

I know a lot has changed since I was 18 but if I could give myself some advice to get a better start in life on a second try, here are a the first things that I would share.

1. Learn to take care of your body, it's the only one you get and it is much easier to work on your fitness and health when you are 18 than when you are 30 or 40 or whatever. While you have free time, this is a great time to learn and practice some good habits that you can carry with you for the rest of your life.

Two main ideas here:

• Find some kind of movement exercises that you enjoy doing and can make a routine of. You don't need to be an athlete or anything. It could be a daily walk, yoga, jogging, weight training, climbing, cycling, sports. For sports, I would look at things that are easy to keep up with as you get older, typically things with less structure or equipment requirements. For example, American football or volleyball might be harder to manage than tennis/pickle ball or indoor soccer/football. Don't make it a chore; you don't have to be great (or even good) at any of it, just find something that you want to keep up with. I know a lot of people also make connections with other people in some of these places (like climbing, cross fit, and sports gyms) but those also tend to be more expensive options.

• Learn to cook (if you don't already know how) and try to build a short list of reasonably healthy recipes that you enjoy and could live on every day, if needed. Try to focus on simple things to start, like eggs or oatmeal for breakfast, healthy sandwiches or wraps for lunch (try to minimize processed meats or peanut butter), for dinner maybe pastas, casseroles, salads, roasted vegetables & potatoes.

Try to come up with things that are quick and easy to make and especially things that can be made from staples that last a long time in the pantry or fridge. For a lot of people, planning, shopping for, and preparing food every day is a major challenge once when added to a job, school, or family. However, if you have a reliable list of foods that you can repeat without much effort, that takes away a major point of stress in your future life.

2. If you have a good relationship with your family, take advantage of this time to minimize your expenses and get some savings started. A lot of people are in a rush to move out and "start" their adulthood. If you are in a bad family situation, that may be the right move. If things are good, maybe get a low stress part-time job to earn a little income and get some experience.

For me, a big part of "low stress" is know that you can walk away at any time because you have a safety net. In my case, I can't quit my job because my family needs the income, which makes stupid things stress me out more than they should. However, when I was a teenager working low wage retail and fast food jobs, they did not stress me out because I knew I could walk out the door at any time without caring. From the outside looking in, my current job pays much better and is much more chill than working retail but I was way less stressed flipping burgers while living at home as a teenager.

The biggest "mistakes" I made after I graduated high school were eating a ton of fast food while going to college, dropping my gym routine when my parents canceled our membership when I was 20, and rushing to move out with my friends about the same time. The result of those things caused me to get fat and deeply in debt in my 20s and it took me all of my 30s to get back to even. I was probably around 35 when I got back to anything close to my high school graduation body weight and around 40 before my net worth went positive and I started any meaningful retirement savings.

My advice - get out there now and put yourself in different scenes and see what you actually enjoy being immersed in. Go to a locally owned hippy farm. Apply to be an extra on a local movie set. ask to take a tour at a local power plant. Do all the events you can, ask to see inside whatever business or org you can think of and talk to people. Show interest when you are interested. Don’t let fear of being annoying stop you. That’s the only way you’re going to figure out what you really want to do. And that’s how you’ll meet the right people

My opinion is that you need to find some hobbies, like number one most important thing. Your hobbies are your true vocation, work is what you do to pay for them. Start small if you're not rolling in money, there are lots of cheap ways to make art, or you could learn to cook more from scratch. Try out a musical instrument, write some bad poetry, build a Gundam model.

Finding work for now does not have to determine your career. Temp agencies are actually kind of great (in an icky sort of way) because they already found a lot of the jobs from office buildings to warehouses to factories. In fact a whole lot of companies only hire through temp agencies. If you want to try a trade walk up to a local shop and ask if they need a green helper.

Imagine that your body is like a metal detector, but instead of making noise it makes emotions. Excitement is the primary signal that you're going in the right direction. Fear is a secondary signal. If you do something because you are afraid of something else, that's the wrong direction usually. If you do something because it excites you, that's the right direction. Sometimes, if you are afraid of something that's the thing you should do (lean into the fear).

This is how you "figure it out". There is no framework, there is no rubric. Everything you can be told from the outside is already outdated. The clearest most accurate signal will always come directly from your experience of your body

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

Try to find something to do that lands somewhere in the middle

If you don't know what to invest an education in, just start trying different jobs in hopes of finding something you can tolerate.

Just sort of go with the flow, and keep an eye out for new things to do and try.

After high school I did community college for a while, ended up dropping out. Met a lot of people I'm still good friends with though, including my wife.

I delivered pizza for a few years, then eventually someone I knew said their job was hiring for their warehouse, so I went and did that for a few more years. Started dating my now wife while I was there, moved out of my parents' house and moved in with her.

Along the way, I chased down a couple other jobs, nothing ever quite planned out. Then one day I saw that my county was doing a hiring event for their 911 dispatch center, so I applied for that. Got the job, asked my girlfriend if she wanted health insurance, and when she said yes we got married.

Eventually ended up getting a house and a dog, and here I am.

As for hobbies, if something sounds fun I try to figure out how to do it. I dabble in a little ham radio, I paint minis, I go hiking and camping, meet up with my friends to play games, cook, etc. They basically all start with me hearing about something cool and deciding I'd like to do it, and then, just doing it.

You decide.

And you work at it.

Change your mind? Fine . Then work at it.

Don't give up because it's hard. Change only because it's wrong for you.

And work at it.

High school really doesn't expose you to many, if at all, real careers. I essentially lucked into the career that I'm in. I wouldn't be that concerned that you don't really have any ideas for a career that you'd be interested in - that's pretty expected.

That being said, you probably should find some interests. Do some volunteering if you've got no idea what to do. There's a lot of good community work that needs to be done, and it'll expose you to many real careers

This is kinda hard to answer without knowing your situation. I mean if you could get into harvard could you cover the cost? So basically everyon has a limited set of options to follow. Even given that I can say I knew I wanted to be a science major based on my high school grades and fascination with how viruses replicate from the whirling blender experiment. I intended to do research and teach. I graduated but did not get through a PhD so that was out. I then worked in industry and found it really did not pay the bills well enough. Im lucky to have tech be this thing which almost anyone could do at the time if you were good with that stuff and make decent cash (you could say that its this way now but its really not the same). I worked in the field but with some serial unemployment but the only significant amount was in relation to the housing market crash. Now however im older and unemployed for over 2 years. So. Anyway. I guess im saying is you make choices from your options and even then things can go all over the place. Im glad I got a good liberal arts and sciences education because I kinda like learning. Im glad I did tech because you have to learn all the time. If I lived in a better society I think I would be generally happy. I sometimes think of things I could do different but I also see it pretty much going the same way really or not as its all kinda a roll of a die.

Either you are born with a passion or you aren't.

The great thing is, you don't!

You just keep finding things that seem fun for a while until either they are not or you die.

I joined the military while still a senior in high school. I left for basic training literally 2 weeks after graduating. I figured it'd be something cool to experience for a few years while I figured out what to do with my life.

Turns out the benefits were too good. I ended up staying for a full 20 years before qualifying for an official retirement and pension. I retired 4 years ago, at 38 years old, and have just been sitting around my house enjoying some solid "me" time.

Every time I think about going back into the workforce, I think about all the drama the civilian sector has to deal with. In the military, everything was organized. All your rules, procedures, protocols, etc. were written down and everyone had to follow them. We were all on the same page.

The civilian sector is a bit like the Wild West compared to that structure. Not to mention, I had job security while serving. I'd sign up for 4-6 years of service at a time and I literally had to be thrown in jail before I'd get "fired" during that time. Which gave me freedom to speak my mind at work more often. In the civilian sector, I have to watch my tongue at work.

So here I am, currently 42 years old, and I still don't know what to do with my life. I'm just living each day as it comes and going with the flow, investing my time in interests and hobbies. I have plans and projects in my life, and I'm slowly working toward personal goals. But do I have my whole life mapped out? Not in the slightest. Heck, I don't even know what I'm doing next week.

Join a travelling carnival, spend some time living off canned alphagetti and meeting people. I ran the Octopus ride.

My advice is think of a practical skill you feel comfortable with and learn it well. If it's useful at any stage of technology, you will have a decent job secure for the rest of your life even if society advances a lot or falls to the stone age.

With that kind of foundation in place, you can then have fun (responsibly) or even afford to build a family with someone. Long term, it is what's useful, though you might miss out on the dumb risks of youth (which are totally peer/social pressure) and cause you to do dumb crap when hit by middle age anxiety.

I had to jerk off a lots of dudes to figure that out .

You didn’t say what you’re doing career-wise. Are you working? Do you like your job? If you answered no to either of those questions then that’s something to work on. It’s hard to go into specifics without knowing what you’re doing with your time.

Are you really a teenager? If you actually are I will pm you my advice so you know i'm not doing it for upvotes. It's a knowledge bomb of pro's and con's.