The short answer is that I’m fairly confident about it and I’m fairly confident in the calibration of my confidence levels.
The long answer relies on my clarifying, I think, what I mean by “would rather do.” I’ll define it as “interesting enough to me to want to spend a significant number of years of my life on.” I actually started getting really burned out on my current pursuit, so if you’d asked me this question about a week ago, I would have answered that I’d rather just get some dumb job and play video games in my free time for the rest of my life, but now I feel much more invigorated about it (primarily due to reading about deliberate practice), and when it comes to actually applying myself to something, this is the thing I’m most interested in.
The only runner-up, as I mentioned in the linked post, is something involved in charity work, ideally something a bit analytical and strategic. I’ve also toyed with the idea of doing something more math-related, but math has always been a weakness for me, though I enjoy it, so I doubt it would be best to pursue that professionally.
Through 80000hours.org, I learned that I could have just been suffering from familiarity bias—i.e. that I’m only considering types of jobs I’m aware of when there could be something I’m not aware of that I would love—so I looked through the descriptions of a bunch of careers, and I just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of them. From what I gather about human psychology, I’m sure if I chose, at random, a career that I’d be likely to be good at, I’d come to like it and be happy, and that’s pretty much what I’ll do once it’s clear that I’ve failed at my current pursuit, but there’s no strong argument for jumping to that stage prematurely. I’ll be a few more years behind in that case than if I quit and jumped to something else now, but since I don’t currently value succeeding in other fields anyway, it seems as though I may as well continue rolling the dice for a while.
The short answer is that I’m fairly confident about it and I’m fairly confident in the calibration of my confidence levels.
The long answer relies on my clarifying, I think, what I mean by “would rather do.” I’ll define it as “interesting enough to me to want to spend a significant number of years of my life on.” I actually started getting really burned out on my current pursuit, so if you’d asked me this question about a week ago, I would have answered that I’d rather just get some dumb job and play video games in my free time for the rest of my life, but now I feel much more invigorated about it (primarily due to reading about deliberate practice), and when it comes to actually applying myself to something, this is the thing I’m most interested in.
The only runner-up, as I mentioned in the linked post, is something involved in charity work, ideally something a bit analytical and strategic. I’ve also toyed with the idea of doing something more math-related, but math has always been a weakness for me, though I enjoy it, so I doubt it would be best to pursue that professionally.
Through 80000hours.org, I learned that I could have just been suffering from familiarity bias—i.e. that I’m only considering types of jobs I’m aware of when there could be something I’m not aware of that I would love—so I looked through the descriptions of a bunch of careers, and I just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of them. From what I gather about human psychology, I’m sure if I chose, at random, a career that I’d be likely to be good at, I’d come to like it and be happy, and that’s pretty much what I’ll do once it’s clear that I’ve failed at my current pursuit, but there’s no strong argument for jumping to that stage prematurely. I’ll be a few more years behind in that case than if I quit and jumped to something else now, but since I don’t currently value succeeding in other fields anyway, it seems as though I may as well continue rolling the dice for a while.