Landing a first job while holing up with an acquaintance after escaping my birth family, and then trying to move to live by myself without realizing just how screwed-up a lot of my subconscious and worldmodel was (and some of you will have noticed that possibility already after reading “escaping my birth family”). Access to the city and not wanting to be more of a burden on my host were legit motivations, but it turns out that that much stress at once combined with the wrong kinds of weakness in handling results in going near-catatonic (at least externally) a few months in and getting fired.

Whoops! Oh, and there's that multi-year non-compete agreement… in the only thing I have experience in…

Fifteen years and several retry cycles later, someone who graduated twelve years after me now has the three solid years of full-time experience that I never got (in significant part because once you have a Résumé of Nothing, it stays that way), and just landed a job making about twice as much as I'm potentially going to be able to start making a month or two from now if I drive my context-switching ability and energy output right up to the limit.

Did I mention that getting access to healthcare to fix relevant issues was almost impossible for almost the entire time? At least I have a potential path to it now—and there's only a decade of backlog…

Don't do what I did and waste your life. You need a fucking real job. Do whatever it takes to keep it for long enough. Otherwise you lose.

(In fact I am not entirely coherent in my opinions on the matter, though—and the rule of equal and opposite advice applies…)