I hate everything about my life...

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There is nothing I like about my life, about the life I've led so far (I'm 28, so still fairly young, but still) - I feel everything I've ever worked for has proved worthless, that almost everything I've done has been a mistake, and I have no idea how to change course - how to actually find something worthwhile.
I am lonely - years back I was in a serious relationship for several years and after the breakup I've never even had a date and frankly became disappointed with the whole thing. I've also become disillusioned with friendship though I've occasionally been able to make friends over the years (no close friends now). So for a while a career was the one thing remaining in my life that seemed promising. Now I've finished the advanced degree I was doing (that too I view as a mistake, as something not worth the effort) and am unemployed, so even that has failed, as my long term job prospects are pretty bleak. Even if I did get a job in my field (and I might get some kind of temporary work in the medium term), I hate my field now (but have no experience or qualifications in anything else). So essentially I feel lost, very few things interest me (and none from which I could earn a living) and I hate my life but have no idea how or in which direction to change it.
A line from the Rolling Stones summarizes my life now: 'with no money in our coats, and no loving in our souls, you can't say we're satisfied.'

I'm not a big fan of life either, but I think you need to see a doctor
Sorry about your work and all

And had you not pursued this path in life, which one would you have pursued, and where would you be now? Someplace better, or worse?

The latter part of that question is difficult to answer, as the path you have chosen gives you little to know insight on the paths you did not choose. Though one might be tempted to proclaim another path known to be an option at the time if your embarkment would have proven more satisfactory, one really can't.

And so it's never a question of right path or wrong path, it's simply a question of most optimal and least optimal. I propose that you certainly didn't choose the least optimal because having a degree, even if you feel it wasn't worth your time, still gives you an advantage over not having one in the eyes of employers.

In the late 90's I was offered a job with my ISP after they noticed me fiddling around with their unix servers (I was trying to configure a computer gateway interface). They offered to train me to be a network administrator. I had to turn them down at the time because I didn't have reliable transportation.

A year or so later I regretted this, as network administration had become a top position and big companies were paying those who could do it salaries frequently exceeding $100,000 a year.

As a poor student...really poor, I thought going to school had been a mistake and regretted my decision as those around me became financially comfortable using skills I had the potential for. People who didn't know how to turn on a computer when I was hard coding web pages were buying cars and houses. Dropping out of school to pursue it wasn't an option because system administrators had become "official" and programs to certify them had been drawn up, and employers wanted certification, not just some dorky 20 year old girl who insisted she knew what she was doing...or at least would figure it out quickly.

But a few years later, one or so to be exact, the dot.com bubble burst, and suddenly, a lot of system administrators were out of work. Those jobs never came back. The ones that still exist, they generally require actual degrees for, not just certificates.

It's easy to be discontent with a path in life if what you were after didn't materialize, or wasn't what you expected it would be, or didn't happen how you wanted it to. It's also easy to be discontent with a path in life if you have changed as a person during your journey, and no longer seek what you were initially after.

To be honest with you, I think a large percentage of college graduates no longer care to pursue their field of study by the time they graduate. Lucky for them, with the exception of doctors and laywers, most people don't actually end up working in the field they studied in college.

Colin Powell studied geology.
Freddie Mercury studied to be an artist in the advertising industry.
Brian May studied physics, quit, and got back to it later. He recently got his PhD in astrophysics.
Gibby Haynes studied accounting (and was good at it)
David Bowie wanted to be a Mime, studied art, music and type setting, and learned how to play the saxophone starting with a plastic one.
Dr.Laura studied physiology.
Gene Simmons studied education.
Tiger Woods studied economics.
Hugh Hefner studied psychology.
Ray Romano studies accounting.
Montel Williams studied engineering.
Honorary Mentioning: The Dalai Lama wanted to be an engineer and is supposedly very good at fixing watches.

Thanks, both of you.

That's hard to answer, apart from the reasons you list, because there are several points at which I could've changed paths. When I finished school, I could've done a different degree, or taken up employment rather than continue studying. Later, I could've done my postgraduate education elsewhere or in a somewhat different field, or not bothered and looked for a job. Right now, every single one of these alternatives seems better than the present - I hate my field and job prospects are very poor. The problem with changing fields is that the alternatives I can think of either would suit neither my strengths nor my interests (sales, for example) or require qualifications and/or experience I don't have (like engineering, which would've been a better career choice). So I'm kind of lost - I know what I don't want to do but I'm not trained for anything else, and I don't know what I actually want to do.

What is your degree in and what do you have the skills to do? Notice they are two separate questions.

And what is it you now want to do instead?

Physics, then physical chemistry. I have a fair number of skills but almost none in depth - for example, I know some programming but I'm no expert programmer. Likewise with a fair number of lab techniques (but lab techniques for academia, not industry), and numerate skills.



More or less realistically, do R&D work for industry (I've come to loathe academia). I have no background or experience in organic synthesis nor in biomedical fields (so no interest from the pharmaceutical industry), nor in the food industry, nor do I have an engineering background. It seems all industry R&D jobs require one of these backgrounds, or are looking for specialists in very specific techniques, or people who already have industrial experience. Note that an industrial R&D job in my case essentially requires emigration, which makes it massively harder than if this sort of job existed in my country (there exist some pharma-related ones, but precious little else unless you already have many years of experience).
More 'philosophically,' I'm not particularly interested in industrial R&D, but I think I could do it and I'm even less interested in sales, management, admin, IT. Things I truly like: reading (literature, not technical stuff - I'm pretty sure I'd be terrible at anything like journalism) and drawing (I'm not good at it, my fine motor skills are not brilliant). Industrial R&D is a compromise between what I might realistically be able to do and what I might have some interest in doing. The problem is that I haven't been able to land a single job offer (or a single job interview) in this (unsurprisingly, as there's a glut of people with similar qualifications worldwide).