I've heard (though it is probably not very accurate -- more a conversationally useful pop science myth than an empirically universal fact) that the advice parents give to their children varies by socioeconomic status. Poor and working class parents typically give advice like "think about what would make you happy". Middle class parents tend to suggest staying upstream of abstractly desirable financial options (like in HS and college take strong math, take pre-med so you can be a doctor, and so on). Upper class parents advise doing stuff consistent with finding and making friends with the highest quality people you can find.

In this framework it seems like your parents were giving middle class advice, and your girlfriend gave you working class advice. If I were your parents, I think I would have been somewhat upset. As a general heuristic, be wary of horizontally transmitted advice!

Personally, my object level advice is to young people for whom the middle class or working class life script was a background assumption and have their mind blown by hearing about the other script, is to just suggest that they compare many options along all three of these criteria (happiness, strategy, quality people), and try to find something that works reasonably well with all of them. Then run your plans by your parents to get their honest and caring and historically informed advice.

Another thing that jumped out at me was that it seems like you were thinking of the question as getting a job that defines your identity for the rest of your life, rather than thinking in terms of what to spend the next few years on that would give the highest enduring net value, with trust that you can re-evaluate and adjust in the future, building on the results so far. It seemed like you took for granted that a final decision would determine the whole future rather than being a decision that would precede potentially more important decisions farther down the line.

There's a meme going around (whose concrete truth is debateable) that "nowadays people will change careers N times in their life". If N=1 (from child to "something") then making a huge decision in one's young adulthood might make sense, but if N=5 then the first one might matter a bit, but you should probably optimize it at least partly so that it gives you information about how to make the next four changes. And if the singularity is really a thing, N could turn out to be larger than most people expect?

The article on the debate about the value of N, written in 2010, says that 2008 might invalidate attempts to collect statistics... but that way of thinking is itself the thing being questioned by people who think N might be high. Crazy economic gyrations from disruptive technology and obsolete institutions is the sort of thing that could cause both a higher value for N, and also macro-level economic instability. Thus if 2008 changed many people's careers, it incremented n for each such person. If something like 2008 happens again, that would increment n again for all the people it affects.

As meta-level life planning advice, I've found generating large lists of theoretically desirable traits that a next step could have, then trimming out (or just down-weighting) the ones that are non-central and statistically redundant, and then churning through lots of options trying to find one that is statistically rare in the awesome direction gives moderately good outcomes.

For reference, neither of my parents went to college, I grew up in a small rural town, I spent four years at a junior college, then four years at a UC, changed majors 3-8 times (depending on how you count), graduated with a BA in philosophy, then bounced between biological research labs and startups, and work at Google now.

The world is big, and "the adjacent possible" seems to be expanding pretty fast lately.

Not sure if you want meta level or more practical, but here is what I regret:

1) You can choose to be a generalist or specialist

2) Largely speaking big cities need specialists and small towns / countryside need generalists

3) I became a specialist and then realized I loathe city life and want to get out, but no chance

Doctors are a good example, if you have one doc per village he better be a GP and not an eye surgeon. While GP's live in cities too, they mainly do pre-filtering and directing people to specialists. In a city, being the best of the handful eye surgeons pays. And you need the pay, because the cost of living is high and real estate is expensive.

(This is the old division of labor as a function of pop density and cost of transportation thing that is known since Adam Smith.)

In my case, I could live rural if I was a generic IT guy or a generic accountant. I do the highly specialized combination of the two which is called ERP consulting. (ERP = SAP, Oracle, Navision...) I am kinda screwed there.

This seems somewhat condensed, you know, like a memory of a decision and not the actual protocol. What other careers have you considered? Have your parents not warned you about the lying a history professor is supposed to do? What arguments to the contrary could have swayed your decision (as opposed to what could not)? What new information did you have to seek as evidence in either direction?

My high school actually made us write career planning papers once a year for 4 years. It certainly helped some people, but the big problem for me was that I was not smart enough and did not know enough to make those plans then! Now, looking back a decade or so, I am perhaps competent enough to do useful planning for my high school self, but I certainly couldn't do the planning for someone else.

The advice I'd give to a general audience like my past self would be to try the career paper thing in case it works, but also put a high, high priority on taking summer internships doing and observing and making contacts in actual day to day work in areas you are interested in. Try to keep some record of how much you enjoyed each thing - then go back to the person who was your boss for your favorite internship and absolutely lean on them for help and advice and recommendation letters.

And yet even that would only have been moderately useful for me. So maybe as a last ditch effort, try to find someone who is highly similar to you but at least 5 years older and get them to tell you what to do - and try it for a little while even if it sounds like something you wouldn't have decided on yourself. My high school self would not have known how to implement this advice properly, but this is absolutely something parents can help with if they don't know how to guide a child who is interested in things they don't have experience in.

If you want to appeal to a broad audience I'd say tone down the "debating complex intellectual questions" stuff. most teenagers aren't terribly intellectual but this kind of advice is important to them and you want them to be imagining themselves in your shoes.

Personally I was very lucky, my parents didn't pressure me into a particular profession though I have ended up in a somewhat similar area to my dad.

I did initially consider studying physics or math in college and missed getting into physics by just a few points but it was very much for the best as I realized later that the things that had appealed to me were much more in line with CS, I thrived in CS where I would have merely done OK in physics or math.

Of course, if anything I do it too much, I spent about half my life perpetually living for 5 years in the future. Sometimes it's important to stop planning and enjoy the current time.

On the note of career choices, I quite like this old quote of EY's:

"Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy? "

How did your plan to become a history professor ultimately work out? What were your odds of becoming a history professor at the time you decided to start working towards that goal? What would you have done if you had failed in your goal? Would failing at becoming a history professor been better or worse than succeeding as a medical doctor?

For the overwhelming majority of people, neither history professor nor medical doctor is a good career choice. I had a cousin who last Thanksgiving mentioned he was considering history for his major in college. I strongly advised against it because of his low probability of success and the amount of work he would have to put in to succeed. By Christmas, he had changed his mind to Structural Engineering.

After considering my options and preferences, I decided that money and security mattered less than a profession that would be genuinely satisfying and meaningful. What’s the point of making a million bucks if I’m miserable doing it, I thought to myself.

You're welcome to believe a history professor's job has more meaning than a medical doctor's, but you're probably on an island in that belief. Money, job security, job meaning, and career interest are just some of the reasons to choose a job path. There is also:

• How well you like your boss
• How well you like your coworkers
• Job perks
• Difficulty of obtaining the job
• Number of hours worked
• Consistency of hours worked
• Amount of travel away from home
• Job Status

That is to name but a few. Money is a good barometer of the first four because higher demand jobs generally give you more options for where you work. The high-paying career paths right now are mostly in Engineering, Technology, Business, and Health Care. Medical Doctor is a bad idea because of the amount of debt and time you have to give up to get there even though it does have high pay and job security once you succeed. It also often has strenuous hours.

Also, it is possible to get into a college of your choice, specialize in a field you like, and still screw up if your priorities change (or, similarly, if your & your parents' priorities used to align well enough up until you graduate). I was hurried into applying for a PhD because 'let's face it, botanists are no good for much else and you will lose all qualification if you don't get in THIS YEAR'. And so I did not choose my topic carefully, and now I am married and have a kid and still stuck in this program. Ahem. The point was, maybe teenagers should already negotiate with their folks what support they can expect if their first choice doesn't immediately set them on a career path?

The sentence after the Mere Exposure Effect is introduced does not quite parse. Might want to double check it.

I liked history myself and still chose a very different path. I have to reasons for that, and if I must be brutally honest I don't know if they are really good reasons or rationalizations, although I do know I more or less had a hunch of them before choosing and that mattered:

1) In some lines of work you just apply for a job ad, in some lines of work it is all about networking. I am a misanthropic guy probably on the spectrum. Go figure. It is far more easy for me to show a bunch of certification showing that I can do stuff with a complicated technological tool businesses absolutely need to use than to be that sort of guy other historians like enough to be offered a position.

2) This is a terrible thing to say, but almost everything is far less fun as work than as non-work, because as non-work you can fish out the fun part, while as work you need to deal with tons of terrible, boring, tedious details. This means almost no work is enjoyable when you need to really do it for a living. I love reading history because the writers have fished out the interesting parts from the tedious parts. But I imagined going through tons of WW2 material like all the military orders stuff, logistics like orders to deliver a bunch of underpants into El Alamein or the court-martial records of Cpl. Cocklepoppy who got drunk and choked someone with them. And having to fish out the interesting stuff from all that noise. I imagine that is what historians do. YAWN. Almost everything we enjoy as a hobby is a "pop" version of it and the work version is far more tedious. I learned it at high school. In elementary school I loved chemistry as it was about making green flames. I went to a high school specialized in chemistry. 5 classes a week. It was tons of calculations. Quickly got bored. I realized real work is boring no matter what because details, details, details so better get paid for it and suffer through it. I intended to save money, retire at 45-50 and then do what I like. Then I started a family so well, it won't work like that.

My family immigrated from

Usage Nazi sez: emigrate from, immigrate to.