Starting from Zero

I'm sitting here looking at my brand new Substack dashboard. Zero subscribers. Zero posts. Just a blinking cursor and the weight of introducing myself to... well, no one yet. But I'm going to write this anyway, because everyone starts somewhere.

My name's Alex. I'm 24, and I've spent the last few years collecting careers like stamps.

The Shape-Shifting Years

As a kid, I was going to be a footballer. Obviously. Then at 13, I discovered psychology books and decided the human mind was far more interesting than football. By the time I was looking at houses with my parents, I'd convinced myself architecture was the answer—I loved imagining how spaces shaped the lives inside them.

Engineering came next. My dad's an engineer, and there was something solid about equations having right answers. But that certainty dissolved when music took over. I'd always played instruments, but suddenly I was obsessed with production, with how you could layer nothing into something.

So that's what I studied. Music production felt creative enough to be mine, practical enough to lead somewhere

.

The Working Years

University was strange. While everyone else was perfecting their beats, I was running a side business selling second-hand clothes online. Not for the money really—more because I wanted to understand how online businesses worked.

After graduating, I became a marketing assistant at a music tech startup. Made sense on paper: music degree, tech company, marketing role. But within months I was already restless, taking on freelance copywriting projects in the evenings.

Then somehow I talked my way into being creative director at a startup. At 23, I was in rooms with some seriously impressive people who'd built real businesses, raised real money. For a year, I absorbed everything I could. It looked cool from the outside.

But something was off. Each role taught me something, but none of them felt like mine. I kept waiting for that moment when work would click into place, when I'd stop looking at other paths and think: yes, this is it.

The Unravelling

I left the creative director role a month before finishing a trip through Latin America. My mother's Nicaraguan, and I'd wanted to reconnect with that side of my heritage. But really, I needed space to think.

I'd ended up travelling with ten other twenty-somethings who'd all quit their jobs to be there. In hostels across Mexico and Colombia, we'd have these circular conversations about what to do next. Everyone had impressive backgrounds. No one had any answers.

What got me wasn't that we were all lost—it was how guilty we felt about it. Like we'd failed some test everyone else had passed.

The Pattern

Those hostel conversations kept coming back to the same themes. We'd sit around comparing our confusion, trying to figure out if everyone else was pretending to have it together or if we were uniquely behind.

I wasn't some sage with answers—I was just as lost as everyone else. But years of career experiments meant I'd thought about these questions from every angle. Sometimes I'd share what I'd learned from my own dead ends, and people would say it helped them think differently about their situation.

What I'm Building Now

Back in the UK, I'm turning that wandering into something useful. Not a career coaching practice—I'm 24, who am I to coach anyone? Instead, I'm building tools and spaces for people like us:

An AI-powered guide that helps you understand yourself before it shows you job listings. Because most career advice starts at step 10 when we're still stuck at step 1.

Events in London where people can admit they don't have it figured out. No networking, no pitches, just honest conversation about the mess of modern careers.

This newsletter, where I'll document what I'm learning. The experiments, the dead ends, the occasional breakthrough.

Why This Matters

I used to think my scattered CV was a liability. Now I see it differently. Every pivot taught me something about what doesn't work. Every role showed me how work can fail to align with who you are.

The problem isn't that we're lost. The problem is that we're using maps drawn by other people for lives that aren't ours.

So this is me, starting from zero. Building something for everyone who's ever stared at a job board and felt nothing. For anyone who's been told they could "do anything" and wondered why that feels more like a curse than a blessing.

If you're reading this, you're here at the beginning. I don't know exactly where this leads, but I know the questions we need to start asking.

If you've ever felt guilty about not knowing what you want from your career, subscribe below. Next week, I'm diving deep into why our generation feels uniquely lost about work—and why that might not be our fault.

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Next week: The Career Abyss—why our generation feels uniquely lost about work, and where this uncertainty really comes from.