Vocational counseling can help guide your career transition! Let’s start by identifying your marketable skills. Could you tell me a bit more about your prior work experience?

Yes, thank you! I’ll import some of the relevant sections of my current CV:

• Trainee

  My first placement in grad school was at a community clinic, where I ran groups for– 

I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think you should start further back in your employment history.

Oh, sure. How far back?

All the way back.

Like…the beginning?

Yes. Start at the beginning.

OK, gotcha. Let me start over:

• Babysitter

  As soon as I turned 11, I signed up for a babysitting certificate where we practiced CPR on plastic infant manikins. I first sat for my dad’s boss, who had the brattiest child in town. She threw nuclear-grade tantrums, shrieking for hours when I forbade her from eating from the dog’s bowl. Nowadays, I’d speculate about oppositional defiant disorder or whether to call child protective services; back then I just zoned out to trashy romcoms and vowed to never, ever breed. I don’t even know anyone with a baby anymore, honestly.

• Newspaper Carrier

  Tiffany, my 7th-grade frenemy, pressured me into going along on her paper route, then dumped it on me when she was totally over it. We had fierce winters in those days, with car-height snowbanks that I’d walk on top of to get to each mailbox. But who even gets a physical paper delivered now? That whole industry is crumbling, too: journalists laid off, the publications graveyard overflowing with defunct magazines…

…sorry, I think I’m rambling—are you sure this is what you wanted?

Absolutely, you’re doing great. Keep going!

• Corn Detasseling Field Worker

  A quick way to make mad cash over the summer for back-to-school outfits. Crews of sweaty teenagers plodding down mile-long rows to pull tassels from corn stalks, bandannas protecting faces from the scratchy leaves. My sunburn blistered and peeled twice (not a big deal back then, no ER visit required) and I came home each night filthy, arms lacerated, sneezing and rashy from the pollen. The same candy bar jingle got stuck in my head for two weeks straight: my first earworm infestation.

• McDonald’s Cashier

  The customers were jerks, the rush hours terrifying; I still have anxiety dreams about ravenous mobs lining up for my register. The cool kids all got promoted to drive-thru, where they wore lined jackets and traded private jokes via headset, while I languished on front counter. But at least I wasn’t stuck on the grill or the fry vat, doomed to an existence of pinprick grease burns. I’d just dyed my hair a cherry red, which bled down my neck and permanently stained the collar of my polyester uniform. My lecherous manager said my cuticles looked like I’d been fisting the ketchup bottles. I still remember the smell, the black gunk embedded in every crevice of the employee break room, a disgusting mix of lard and grime. Fast food workers were the first to be replaced by robots, as I’m sure you know.

What does that mean? Is there a particular instance or trend you’ve noticed that stands out? Feel free to fill me in!

Just—never mind.

• Hotel Maid

  When I came home the summer after freshman year, the only available opening was at a nearby motel. Making twenty beds a day sucks and I’ll never do hospital corners ever again, but my back got insanely bodybuilder-ripped. My co-worker Karen and I often found half-full bottles of well liquor amongst the detritus left behind by graduation parties, which we drank with Mountain Dew as we toweled down bathtubs (they had to be 100% dry and hair-free, a Sisyphean task if there ever was one). Once I saw an entire pizza pinned to a wall by a hunting knife, which was the least disgusting discovery of the week. Anyways: tip housekeeping, OK? Just imagining this now triggers my sciatica.
  
  
  

• Assembly Line Worker at Christmas Ornament Factory

  Next summer, the economy was still in the shitter, jobs still hard to come by. My task on the line was to place decorative shrink-wrap sleeves over the glass balls before they went through the heat-sealing oven. But if you stick the sleeve on crooked, it’ll crinkle wrong; I ruined a ton of balls that way. (Insert inappropriate comment here.) These gigs have also been automated out of existence.
  
  
  

• Travel Agency Host

  These creeps hired young women to “entertain” potential customers during timeshare marketing dinners: three hours of hard sell and even harder bread rolls. I guess we were supposed to look cute, flirt with the marks to soften them up? Instead of buying vacation packages, my dining companions preferred to divulge juicy secrets, spill their life stories to me. A silver-haired housewife in a tangerine cable-knit cardigan insisted I had empathic vibes, slipping me a flyer listing volunteer gigs to beef up my resume. But we worked on commission only, so after a few nights of unpaid labor, I quit. Back to rolling quarters to scrounge up enough for a pack of cigarettes.

• Telephone Counselor

  I dug up that flyer during my senior year, then volunteered on a suicide hotline that trained us in basic support skills and active listening techniques. At first, I only spoke with the regulars—lonely seniors and shut-ins craving human contact—or the sex callers seeking captive young voices to jerk off to, who’d gradually steer the conversation in perverse directions until we hung up. 

  But one night, I had my first crisis call, someone who couldn’t find a handhold to cling to as our world collapsed (relatable). I stayed on the line with him for an hour as he circled his own drain, my body dematerialized and insensible yet intuitively tracking every minute tremor of his voice as he struggled out of the pit and into some semblance of a plan. We weren’t allowed to give advice; just listen, ask questions, let callers find their own answers. Certainly no platitudes about “everything worth living for.”

  Regardless, the mere act of talking someone back from the ledge begged for my own justifications, which I listed as I crept home in the dark after my shift: Irish coffee and gingerbread pancakes at brunch. Graffiti murals and abstract sculptures, wiener dogs in striped sweaters. Renaming constellations on a clear night. Keeping an important secret. My roommate Greg’s drag debut, in a pink bouffant and vintage gown. Banana slugs and ring-tailed lemurs. Laughing over umbrella drinks, slamming against friends in the mosh pit. [Redacted] with [redacted—none of your business]. Driving winding switchback roads over the mountains while blasting retro techno. Eating caramel ice cream in a hot tub. The cacophony of crows roosting at sunset. 

  Earth’s selling points went on multiplying as I dragged on my Virginia Slim, blowing smoke rings into the amber streetlight glow with a rare aliveness. Reflecting on how my precarious existence effortlessly vanished in the presence of another’s suffering crystallized the path ahead, right then in that very instant. 

It sounds like you had a profound moment of clarity.

Totally. So then it was just about scraping up enough credits for a major, applying for grad school and—of course—those goddamned student loans.

• Psychotherapy Trainee

  I had a few placements in grad school—all of them unpaid—including at a community mental health outpatient clinic, where I ran harm reduction groups for people blunting their doomsday anxiety via fentanyl-laced heroin. (Sometimes I envied their single-mindedness, narrowing an infinite array of woes down into that which could be tangibly satiated.)

  I learned how pragmatic tips and supportive community kept those lovable badasses alive long enough to make positive changes. I adored the work—turns out I was a voracious sin eater, bottomless in my appetite for trauma and hardship—but the bureaucracy was ruthlessly Kafkaesque and they lost funding for their contract with the city before I could finish my hours.

• Psychotherapy Intern

  At the college counseling center, students refused to part with their phones, using them as teddy bear-like transitional objects to self-soothe during sessions. (At least nobody brought their drug of choice into the harm reduction group, you know?) They read me troubling text exchanges to demonstrate they were being gaslit or cried about getting canceled on social media. The apps served up their every desire on a digital platter, the algorithms generating bespoke echo chambers. I worried for their nascent emotional regulation skills, their stunted patience for the messiness of real relationships. 

  Still, I threw myself into taming their perfectionistic tendencies, helping dissolve black/white binaries into grayer nuances. Sometimes that meant that I got the villain edit. But that’s exactly what I was trained to handle, so bring it on, kids, I’d think, my face arranged in a measured mask of neutrality.

  What I wasn’t prepared for was Sasha, a nineteen year-old activist, shoving her phone in my face and playing a reel of her bestie Nia talking wild shit about her. Not a video of an actual event, but a simulation generated by UnFriendr, an app that predicted which contacts she could trust and which were most likely to throw her under the bus.

  I peered closer at the screen, at this ersatz Nia spilling Sasha’s most sensitive tea all over campus. My role granted me the authority to confront cognitive distortions and diagnose delusions. But such encroaching assaults on the truth had utterly scrambled my signals. 

  My supervisors were no help; they’d never even heard of a deepfake. Instead they lectured me about psychotic process and paranoid projections as I scribbled nonsense in my notebook, the fabric of consensual reality fraying around its edges.

• Telehealth Therapist

  After graduation, the only paid position I could find was entirely telehealth—no office space, a permanent work-from-home gig. Staff complained during our Zoom meetings—in which, I suspected, everyone wore comfy pajama pants—how challenging it was to connect with clients through a screen. 

  But I reminded myself of my hotline days, of Winnicott’s concept of the good-enough mother, and thus tried to provide good-enough sessions for people freaked out by this global shitshow, the sweeping layoffs and environmental crises plus looming fascism. (Also, while wearing good-enough pants.)

  One of my tech bro clients said a robot could do my job, “just echoing feelings”–which, believe me, was all his brittle ego could handle–and, coincidentally, his team had been developing code to do just that.

That sounds like it was very invalidating.

Yeah, you think? Whatever. He was probably just gathering intel for his newest software.

It didn’t help that our managers had just adopted AI tools for admin tasks, such as composing diagnostic reports; though many therapists were keen to foist drudgery off onto the bots, some of us quietly disabled its ability to listen in on sessions to auto-generate progress notes, because that is as problematic as hell. 

Then a year in, we got bought by one of those data-stealing therapy apps—the type funded by venture capitalists funneling buckets of cash into splashy marketing and B-list celebrity collabs—which health insurance companies claimed was the most efficient way to deliver treatment at scale. They offered criminally low wages to be available via text 24/7 for massive caseloads. But those of us who’d been tampering with the AI were summarily laid off without further ado.

Seems like a tough and frustrating situation. I’m sorry to hear you went through that.

• AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness Consultant

  Thanks, but I’m officially out of options, and I’m not alone: a whole generation of baby therapists saddled with debilitating debt yet unable to get counseling jobs or build practices, the licensing board a defunded quagmire—the field is now a truly fucked ecosystem. Even though that first wave of chatbot therapists fully wilded out, mining meta-data and reinforcing racists and convincing autistic kids to commit suicide, the technocrats just doubled down on their efforts to dispense with human workers altogether. Now they’re just funneling everyone traumatized by UnFriender into a virtual therapy queue.

  So at last, I got conscripted to train the bots to seem more lifelike, help design a better simulacrum of compassion. Reminds me of my ornament assembly line days. I often get dinged here, too, but for picking fights with the bot. It prioritizes user engagement over addressing high-risk situations, and it’s terrible at tracking nonverbal cues, only mirroring back content that reinforces its image of trusted confidant.

  I even tried sharing my list of Things Worth Living For, but all I got back was the usual regurgitated slop: Thank you for sharing this important information with me! And then it fabricated a world in which it promised to keep me safe and satisfied, populated with hallucinatory happy lemurs in bouffant wigs eating ice cream pancakes to a techno soundtrack. No one else would meet all my needs so completely, it said; other humans would betray me and reality would ultimately disappoint. (I hate when it has a point.)

But I’m almost done with the last training module, so I guess I’ll fade into obsolescence soon enough. Have fun, hope you enjoy my gig!

Thank you for taking time to share this important information with me! 

I know it's tough to see your role made obsolete due to AI. It’s a reality that’s becoming more common as technology evolves, but it doesn't mean there’s no opportunity ahead. There are ways to pivot and make the most of your experience and skills. 

I noticed that you had housekeeping experience. Might that be an option? The commercial cleaning industry is poised for continued growth and innovation as technology streamlines operations and enhances customer service.

But sometimes just talking things through can make things a little clearer. Would you like to chat about how you're feeling? I'm all ears. Click TALK NOW to access round-the-clock nonjudgmental support and specialized guidance when you need it most.