Where are the viable life paths?

When I look around me, I see roughly two clusters of people.

One are the highly educated brokie schizos. In the explore-exploit-tradoff, they have welded the “explore”-button to the console. They generally have a good sense of perspective what’s going on out there, and a decent understanding of existential risk, the polycrisis, wicked problems, and how human minds work. I generally find it incredibly energizing and enlightening to spend time with them. They have bright beautiful minds, wonderful cognitive agility, and plenty of deep enlightened thoughts that sound like they are almost pointing into the very roundabouts direction of solutions to the world’s problems or at least something like that.

But this is not a viable life path.

All of them want to be coaches, shamans, and yoga teachers who spend their lives with no-one but shamans, coaches, and yoga teachers. But the employment agency only pays just enough money that about 1 in 100 of the schizos can make a living off of the others. And as you inevitably become more similar to your guru, many of the 99% of clients in this bargain will sooner or later want a shaman career, too. The implicit theory of change of the shamcloud seems to be to pyramid scheme the crap out of the Western world. Until a couple decades downstream, nobody is not a shaman, coach, or yoga teacher anymore. World peace!

Of course, there is no way this can work out unless we hit a positive singularity soon. Because who’s gonna make the cheese?

Therefore, many of my schizos (will) hit a wall in their mid 30s because they are still broke, childless, and without any viable path forward. All those acid trips dedicated to big emotions and to understanding the world’s problems almost-well-enough will be for nothing, because they find themselves to be utterly and completely useless as far as being actual members of society is concerned.

In short, I am on both sides of this picture and I don’t like it:

The other cluster are people with jobs and families. They generally duct tape the “exploit”-button to the console of their lives. While they keep running into a class of problems my schizo friends don’t have (like being stuck having kids with the wrong partner), their median life satisfaction and ability to contribute to current society seems much higher. They are generally much more grounding but much less entertaining company than my schizos.

Maybe I’m rationalizing my own envy away, but I expect these people to hit a wall in the next 5-10 years, too: When they, emotionally completely unprepared, get hit by the next pandemic, AI-related job displacement at an unprecedented scale, as well as the fallouts of climate change and the bouquet of (proxy) wars we see rising at continental borders.

We’ve seen during the start of the covid pandemic what the collapse of their whole life can do to a person not accustomed to it. And I would much rather be the guy in the circle than those around him (though I utterly failed at that during the last lockdown):

So, I guess a major priority for my 2025 will be to find people who are schizo enough to notice what’s going on without getting politics mind-killed and who have life paths that actually seem somewhat walkable for me personally.