There are indeed downsides, but my feeling is that if you got a job and moved
out, you would afterwards ask yourself “Why the hell didn’t I do this sooner?!”
One concrete point in favor of being self-supporting is that even if your first
job is crappy, your next one will be marginally better, and so on. Right after
high school I worked at a fast food restaurant. Then I worked in a bookstore,
then doing telephone tech support, and now I’m a computer programmer. (I don’t
have any degree.)
By the way, I worked in that fast food job for four years. That was too
long, but at the time I was too lazy and too scared to look for something
else.
My experiences with jobs have been pretty bad. The “technical” jobs I’ve had were rather unpleasant experiences, and the two times I had “menial” jobs, I was fired in under a week.
There are indeed downsides, but my feeling is that if you got a job and moved out, you would afterwards ask yourself “Why the hell didn’t I do this sooner?!”
One concrete point in favor of being self-supporting is that even if your first job is crappy, your next one will be marginally better, and so on. Right after high school I worked at a fast food restaurant. Then I worked in a bookstore, then doing telephone tech support, and now I’m a computer programmer. (I don’t have any degree.)
By the way, I worked in that fast food job for four years. That was too long, but at the time I was too lazy and too scared to look for something else.
My experiences with jobs have been pretty bad. The “technical” jobs I’ve had were rather unpleasant experiences, and the two times I had “menial” jobs, I was fired in under a week.
Keep trying! Technical job pleasantness has a very large standard deviation.