Reply #10: there is no right track

[hfojvt]

but if you are able to keep moving forward that could be taken as a sign.
I think it is kinda odd to have options. As a college student, clearly I had some - I could decide which classes to take and which major to pursue. However, having graduated, I had much fewer. My options basically were to fling my resume into the job market and hope to land a job. Bascially, other than DoD, I found nothing. So I went back to school, throwing good time after bad. Gee, if one degree is worthless, another one is going to help, right? In retrospect, perhaps one more degree would have accomplished something, plus giving me the title which I use fradulently now anyway. But I spent seven years in the school of "starting your own business from scratch" and also "working grunt jobs". After the business, the "grunt jobs" rut has continued, and my escape hatch of more school fizzle out.

Has it been a life of "constant mediocrity"? Perhaps, although I think I have done my low status jobs quite well, and accomplished many other non work, non status things. I will give one piece of advice though, FWIW - do not give up on your dreams. I had plans when I was 24, and I told people about them and they laughed and said it would never work, and I let that become a self-fulfilling prophecy, aided by the discouragement of "betrayal" by people I had considered friends, even when I had tried to steel myself against such possibilities. Do not let the bastids and the nay-sayers get you down. Because "people can be so cold. They'll hurt you, and desert you. Well they'll take your soul if you let them, but don't you let them ..."