h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It would appear I can get money while doing my master thesis, if I choose to. That should make things easier.

Well this whole university endeavour has failed. I feel like I need a new beginning, up roots and head to a new city or new country.

So trudging along, I might be doing a master thesis about geophysical investigation of quickclay. It does involve moving to a new city as well, the logistics of which might be rather complicated.

Tell us more...

It´s part of a two year project sponsored by a group called Geoscientists Without Borders. It should hopefully help with landslides and such. I will need to move to a city about 6 hours up north, that I haven´t been to before. It´s a student city, so housing at this time will also be difficult to find. Especially if you have to travel 6 hours just to look at a place.

So I now have no money, no job and no job interviews. Hurray. I might be living on the street next month, should be fun in these winter months.

Go and Occupy!

Look outwards rather than inwards - how can you make the world a better place?

Don't spit on the sidewalk?

I would be really grateful if you wouldn't. And if no one did, come to that.

Xan - it looks like all you've really done for long periods at a time is study, really. So your CV is heavy on qualifications and low on experience. Time to get some experience. I know that's no help, but it might point you in a direction. I could check out the ads in Die Zeit for you(they're all at universities) I think you could manage on English at a German university, although German might help for every day life.

I'm not quite sure what kind of experience it is you think I could get at those universities. Doing research, or more studies?

Teaching? I thought maybe it would make the transition from study to work easier for you.

OK, let's brainstorm. Your main areas are chemistry, geology, right?

Well geology really. Also wouldn't teaching involve a few years of teacher training in most cases? Also at times it feels like I knew more geology before I began my courses than I do now.

Xan

I was somewhat thrown by the OP with the mention that it was time to start getting an education.. Checking your profile I see that you were 23 in 2001, and started this conversation in 2002. That makes you c34 years old now- just a few years younger than our son.

But it is pretty clear that you had been getting an education in many ways already by 23- and I think that your problems may be those of a "Big Bang" generation which has been launched into a global age of infinite possibilities, but no clear purpose or direction beyond chaos management.

I think that it tends to be a very difficult age especially for boys and men, because 'the females of the species' can at least feel that these are years of momentous new opportunities for women- which by definition means redefining the role of 'the male of the species', often seen as largely unnecessary and useless- as in much female Afro-Caribbean humour.

There is a view of history that lays culpability on various parts of humanity- usually male- for producing things like "The Age of Catastrophe", and this makes it difficult for modern leadership and direction to achieve credibility and conviction. In fact historians gave up some decades ago trying to write the History behind the times that we are living through, in order to help us to shape the Future, largely leaving the field to scientists and technocrats who are no Humanists.

Thus the volume "The Way Ahead" that was produced in the 1990's in anticipation of the New Millennium had contibutions by all kinds of people with visions of the Future, but none of the Fifty were actually historians showing how we could build a Future on to our Past.

And it seems that this was the basis of your OP.

So in a way I see your basic question as one for the whole of humanity in the developing global crisis, that is most severe in the developed world. The developing world is quite happily trying to get to where we are, not realising- as D.H.Lawrence described in the 1920's that we have progressed to the edge of an abyss.

The Second World War knocked us back a bit. But this just made it easier to make our way back towards the abyss even faster.

So, when we all understand what we should do with our lives, it may be easier for boys, youths and young men to understand just what they have to offer in the challenge of the Future.

That was a rather more philosophical view on it than I had. My problems are only partly existential. It is also about not having infinite possibilities. For example another friend of mine who graduated with a master's degree in geology, now has to leave his native Brazil and go work above the polar circle in Sweden. That is part of the problem, that academic education seems to give you very little possibilities.

Incidentally looking at job ads, I just found one that sounds a lot like the company I worked part time for before Christmas. I'm just going to talk to them, see if they might want me back for full time.

Xanatic

Well you did say that you were at the stage to begin your education, when perhaps you really meant your job orientated preparation. Education used to be thought of as "pure" and not applied, and I recall the way that our daughter who did a Masters Degree in Physics found that at the higher levels it changed from the exciting revelations of her schooldays- and the Physics that informed so much of our engineering and technology to Physics of less obvious mundane application. Her Physics friend- the top Physicist of their year- went on to to research and I understand has now completed his project mapping the Universe.

Our challenges are rather more mundane, and- rather than take up the challenge to build a new generation of air-to-air missiles, she chose to become an Actuary.

Obviously with age and what you have already spent time learning you have more or less closed off many avenues. I remember- having gone into comprehensive school-teaching in the inner city- reaching that point of "burn-out" that happened to most of the Victorians and Edwardians who went to work in the East End missions and the like.

So after 23 years I resigned in order to take stock of my life and work out just what I would do next. But I had already travelled a road and had certain experiences and momentum. After a few months- including a particular day teaching in a school for children with special needs, and in particular a morning spent with a little girl with cerebral palsy, I decided that actually I loved teaching and had acquired some useful experience etc. I returned to teaching in a rather different environment for the last 13 years of my working life.

Since retirement I have faced your question once,in fact more accurately more than once.

But I do not see anything like the Sixties "I have a dream" for "all of God's children" mentality. As I said before just what we are supposed to be achieving beyond perpetuating our existence is not very clear.

Having not fully read through this thread as it has rolled on for the last ten years it does seem to me that you tended to be rather dismissive about the time that you spent travelling in Asia, regarding it perhaps as a piece of youthful indulgence before you "settled down".

Your mention of Danish roots puts me in mind of Niebuhr Senior (I constantly mix up Bartholdt and Karsten) who wrote very important travel books in the Eighteenth Century. As geology seems to be your academic specialisation it is very much a global subject and some familiarity with Asia might be useful in the appropriate firm. Alternatively as you have obviously has a taste for study, one option might be to go to teach in Asia. One of our friends- a retired biology teacher- spent a couple of months teaching in Nepal last Autumn.



Good luck anyway.

Serious question, how do you keep going when you feel your life is a failure?

Change your definition of 'success' and 'failure' and take it one [insert period time you feel you can survive] at a time. Keep going even when there seems no point and keep hoping things are going to get better at some point.

Xanatic

Just a few ideas that I try to make work for me:

Perhaps the first thing is to recognise perhaps the fundamental dynamic of this time of the year when Life is becoming resurgent again getting ready to renew and re-affirm itself, and, while winter lethargy (speaking for myself) can be bad enough, there is the new challenge of possibly feeling "up for it"- adding a new chapter, but not really being aware of what it would be worth doing.

When I started facing the bleakness of retirement when their seemed very little point in trying to do anything much, I wrote a song and a piece that applied to our contemporary world on the theme of "Cutting Back to Healthy Rootstock" looking back to a lonely and deserted time in my life, which had its potential and potency.

The first verse:

I'm cutting back to the root
To the time before I had flower and fruit
When life was a search for upward thrust
Towards the light, out of the dust.

Having channelled my energies into the flower and fruit of my working and family life, it seemed appropriate at that time to try to cut back to that energy of adolescence that I had harnessed and to try to reconnect with things that had been so crucial in my life before it narrowed down and became more limited and specialised.

There is a conventionality that challenges us to accomplish "great things", but greatness can also find outlet in breadth and depth of accomplishment.

Cass