if you don't care about pay then just do volunteer work to help out your community

>>71952
Most any job will make you feel "useful" on some level. Humans are psychologically squishy like that.

What I think you feel like you want, though, would involve a more hands-on kind of job rather than sitting behind a desk pushing a pencil. If you want a concrete suggestion, try apprenticing with a pipe organ builder. Building pipe organs is a job that requires knowledge of metalworking, woodworking, electrical work, HVAC work (for the blowers), acoustics, and draftsmanship (to figure out where to put it and how). Even if you don't stay with it it'll give you enough of a taste of lots of different disciplines that you can pursue whichever of those tickles your fancy.

>>71957
Yea but I need a job that pays money

Food service is pretty useful. People need food. That should be your standard of measure, I think. There's also working in healthcare. Nursing or something, the ship has probably sailed for being a doctor. Being an obscure fetish camwhore also works. Lots of fetishes out there that need servicing.

>>71969
EMS is ballza if you can stomach it. It doesn't pay too well, but you can usually get your training paid for and it's always useful.

If you are in the US, just find a volunteer fire department and the county will foot the bill for training. In my state, it's a 165 hour class with additional hours of ride-along time needed. It's pretty strenuous. For us, it's set up in 9 different chapters and if you fail one test, you are out of the class for ballza. We started with 30 people, and ended with 10. It's the difficulty of an average college course, so if you have the reading skills of someone with a GED, you'll be fine. After you are certified as an EMT, you can find a job working a private ambulance company. That usually means you are driving old patients to doctors appointments for $12 to $14 an hour. If you are still looking for action, volunteer some of your free time back with that fire house you signed up with in the beginning.

After you work there for a while, you might be able to get a job as a 911 responder. If you don't get any additional training, you'll still be a BLS unit, which means you won't exactly be going out and saving lives every day, but you'll be doing ballza work that actually impacts the lives around you. Mainly, you're calls will be drunk assholes at a bar, slips, falls and old people having trouble breathing eight hours prior.

At that point, you could also get trained as a paramedic and that is where the real action is. Pay is still shit considering what you do, but you would actually be saving lives on a near daily basis, depending on where you are riding. You'll have a lot of medical knowledge and cool war stories to tell at parties.

However, if you do this, you do have a 1 in 4 shot of serious PTSD, an increased chance of failed relationships, mental illness and suicide and other bad shit. The average burnout for a paramedic is about 5 years, which is pretty nuts.

You'll see some shit that you will take with you to your grave. Shit you never really want to talk about ever again. People ask me what the worst call I've been on, and I lie. I tell them about how I got shit on by a senile vietnam war vet, because it's funny! That's what they want to hear. They don't want to hear about the 16 year old who hung himself outside his bedroom window or the toddler who drowned in a pool. Too depressing. That's the kind of stuff you'll need to keep with you. Luckily, there are things in place to help EMS workers with mental trauma, but still, the risk is there.

A lot of people really like it though. If you are looking for something to actually help and you think you can handle it, this might be for you.

I was arrested recently for shitting in my town's only freshwater reservoir. Maybe you should become a forest ranger or whoever those meanies were who held me there until the cops showed up. The thing is, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. That reservoir hasn't seen the last of my ass.

>>72041
can you tell us your depressing stories?

>>72098
Yeah sure.

My first DOA was a dude who hung himself outside of his bedroom window. That had been my fire house's third suicide that week and it's second hanging. Dispatch told us it was a cardiac arrest, but we were all moving so quickly that I didn't have time to look at the paper to see that it was a suicide. So we get there and the paramedic yells back to me not to bother with the stretcher. Just grab all the shit and run. (Paramedics are ALS units, which stands for advanced life support. It also stands for Ain't Lifting Shit) I look outside and see that the firefighters are pulling out ladders and stuff. I'm wondering if the guy had a heart attack on his roof or something, and then I look up. There he was. Hanging there in a tshirt and sweatpants. We cut him down and start CPR, knowing full well that it probably isn't going to work. As I'm doing compressions, I read his shirt which says "[xx] high school senior week!!" with pictures of happy kids on the beach and shit like that. That almost got too real for me. You can be pretty disconnected when you need to focus on what you need to do. However, it's those little details you notice that remind you that this is (or was) a real living person with hopes, dreams, and desires.

This one isn't as exciting, just sad. There was a woman who was complaining of a vague pain in her forehead. We get there and do our general assessment. She looks about 50 years old, but I notice track marks on her arms. General rule of thumb, if you see track marks, guess how old they look and subtract by 20 and that's closer to how old they actually are. Sure enough, she was in her early thirties. She kept on insisting that the paramedic give her something for her pain, but he wasn't budging. When she saw that her complaint didn't work, she would then say something else her. So it started with, "Ow my head hurts so much!" to, "Ouch my stomach!" to, "Oh no my leg is in so much pain!" Once she saw that none of this was working on the paramedic, she starts looking at me to give her something. I wanted to be like, "Bitch, I can only give you Tylenol. Don't ask me for painkillers," but that would be unprofessional.

Anyway, as I do the patient assessment, I discover she has hep B and C and her liver was failing. Apparently she had been clean for 9 years, because that's when she had a kid. That means all of these diseases and shit were caused by her partying back when she was around 22. I knew she wasn't going to live to see 40. She wasn't going to see her kid graduate high school, all because of dumbass decisions she made when she was barely an adult. So when I see people my age (23) doing dumbass things at parties and stuff, I think about that woman. Meeting her is something I'm going to take with me for a while. Hell, her memory in my head might very well outlive her.

Another DOA where a man died in hit computer chair in his basement. I could imagine worse ways to go. He was old, and it seemed pretty peaceful. The depressing part was his wife and all of his dogs. He had three and they were all really upset. The woman was just in absolute shock of it all. I can't imagine what it might have been for her at that moment. Once we were done there, we went to dunkin donuts. I had the chocolate cake donut.

>>72106

Could you explain to me exactly how the physical complaints result in liver failure and appearance of aging?

>>72106
Did you ever find out why the kid hung himself? Is that even something you'd follow up on, or is it like "nope, not my problem, who wants coffee?"

>>72110
Sorry. I wasn't clear. The aging was because of IV drugs. Herion. That's what I meant with the track marks on her arms. You can see that, and you can tell that you should subtract 20 from the age you think they are. The liver failure came from drinking too much. The hep b and hep c came from sharing needles.

>>72111
I didn't follow up and I tend not to. I did learn that he was in a halfway home, so we was pretty addicted to drugs at one point. That's all I know.