Veterinarian. I really liked working with animals medically and in a rehab capacity, but rehab breaks you if you love animals. So many of the candidates are ones that can't be re-released and are too wild or injured to keep. Euthanasia, even when it's the ethical option and the highest mercy you can give, is such a miserable experience.
Cultural anthropologist. Before the 2008 recession I just wanted to fuck off to some remote corner of the planet and do field studies. My parents refused to let me study it in the UK and at the time I was trying to strike out on my own so I didn't have the money to study it in the US. Then the recession hit and that STEM-humanities split became a very hot culture war. Even if I had gone into massive debt to get one of the advanced degrees that actually lets you do something in anthropology, at best I'd be any other publish-or-perish academic making adjunct wages.
Ethnobotanist. I really like the idea of Terrence McKenna without the woo. Working with psychedelics in a formal way as a materialist would be very interesting, but like anthropology you're desperately competing for a handful of positions that pay a living wage.
Trauma doc/nurse. Emergency medicine is my shit. I'm completely at peace and in my element if there's a polytrauma to treat. The ward, fire stations, and ambulances/helicopters are all such amazing work environments that I would stick around after shifts. Then I worked at a really poorly run hospital with 40% manning, 14 medics covering 36 positions in that ward. If the hours, 80+ per week, didn't kill you then the nature of the work did. You'd work a critical incident and then not even have the manpower to cover for a debriefing, going right back into the next room as they wheeled the patient out of the last one. I could do everything except for kids. I had signed up to treat marines because they volunteer to be injured, instead I got an endless stream of them and their wives hurting or killing their kids, kids committing suicide, and adult cases where the scene would be full of all of their screaming kids. Even hiking around them is now very iffy for me.
Veterinarian. I really liked working with animals medically and in a rehab capacity, but rehab breaks you if you love animals. So many of the candidates are ones that can't be re-released and are too wild or injured to keep. Euthanasia, even when it's the ethical option and the highest mercy you can give, is such a miserable experience.
Cultural anthropologist. Before the 2008 recession I just wanted to fuck off to some remote corner of the planet and do field studies. My parents refused to let me study it in the UK and at the time I was trying to strike out on my own so I didn't have the money to study it in the US. Then the recession hit and that STEM-humanities split became a very hot culture war. Even if I had gone into massive debt to get one of the advanced degrees that actually lets you do something in anthropology, at best I'd be any other publish-or-perish academic making adjunct wages.
Ethnobotanist. I really like the idea of Terrence McKenna without the woo. Working with psychedelics in a formal way as a materialist would be very interesting, but like anthropology you're desperately competing for a handful of positions that pay a living wage.
Trauma doc/nurse. Emergency medicine is my shit. I'm completely at peace and in my element if there's a polytrauma to treat. The ward, fire stations, and ambulances/helicopters are all such amazing work environments that I would stick around after shifts. Then I worked at a really poorly run hospital with 40% manning, 14 medics covering 36 positions in that ward. If the hours, 80+ per week, didn't kill you then the nature of the work did. You'd work a critical incident and then not even have the manpower to cover for a debriefing, going right back into the next room as they wheeled the patient out of the last one. I could do everything except for kids. I had signed up to treat marines because they volunteer to be injured, instead I got an endless stream of them and their wives hurting or killing their kids, kids committing suicide, and adult cases where the scene would be full of all of their screaming kids. Even hiking around them is now very iffy for me.