This is such a big one. In a broad sense, it can be hard to concretely plan a route of how to get to that next career.

It may already have become harder to go back to school if some schools feels compelled to reject students' applications to prove that they aren't doing "DEI," or if students can't be out on campus, or if student loans become ungettable due to the possible dissolution of the Department of Ed.

In other respects, too, how do you build your personal network? In what industries can you be out? What if nonprofits lose their federal funding, as was just almost accomplished in the past week until a judge froze the order?

I'm personally questioning the usefulness of LinkedIn as a networking tool — in part because it's owned by Microsoft and I don't trust that LinkedIn won't go the way of Meta (Zuckerberg) and X (Musk), and in part because of LinkedIn's "Rewrite with AI" button and the persistent rumor that more than half of the posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. To build a career, do I have to go through a social network that may be vulnerable to right-wing influence, and do I have to wade through a sea of bot-written posts (including, in one recent case, an AI-generated profile photo of a "human" who wants to befriend me) to find people who will authentically accept me, and who I can trust with my authentic self, despite the fact that they're pressing buttons to spit their public posts out of a machine? Maybe LinkedIn (or any social media platform) is not the thing to use, but then, how to build the new career in 2025?