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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.