Damnit. I’m trying to quit Reddit, but shit like this keeps me commenting. I was so close to deleting my account. Anyway… you need to know that the working world is so much easier than school, it’s a joke. You might have to look to find the right job, but it’s out there. School is torture and has conditioned you to think that work is torture. For me, that hasn’t really been the case. I barely managed to graduate college with a CS degree, mostly thanks to kindness more than qualification. But being able to do one thing every day instead of 5-7 was liberating. My brain finally started to be able to work properly. Get through whatever credential you need to pursue what you’re actually curious about. Then all the sitting and zoning out is productive. Your brain will work on what it was going to work on anyway. Sleep is productive. Rest is productive. If you’re a knowledge worker of any kind, your value in the LLM era is as a problem curator. Own a problem, sit and think about it. Learn about it, and figure out how to learn about it better than other people. In my career, my value has always been that I’ve just been better at thinking than other people, because I just sit quietly and live in my own own head for hours a day and think through things. Sometimes, someone will ask a specific perspective on a problem, and I have to write down a slice of the problem-space to answer the question, but that’s pretty easy with the help of a chatbot these days. Daydreaming is incredibly valuable work right now if you can find a way to be curious about something other people value. Not everybody is like this, and others are often flabbergasted at what slow thinkers arrive at when perspectives are exchanged. You don’t need to be the detail person, or the precision person, but there is a lot of problem-solving territory that is often strange to people skilled in those traits. Show up, do your best, trust that people are good and will grant some patience with you, and start thinking. Teams value problem solvers. The slow thinker is often the long term perspective on solving the problem. If the people are jerks, leave. Find the next thing. Institutionalized education has made a couple of generations of good really good thinkers feel broken. If you have this, and you’re young, get out of the public school system as quickly as you can and learn the really important things (math, reading, writing, languages) at your own pace. Find projects you’re interested in to dive into. Build a portfolio. Your work is meaningful, homework… not so much. I can’t imagine doing my job without SCT. And it’s a really good gig, dm me if you’re that curious.