Do you plan to drive... forever?

Once on the Ill. green stamp, near O'Hare, busy, all 3 lanes, I was in the right lane, like a good boy, up ahead, I see a man, standing on the shoulder line, looking straight across the road. By the time I realized what this guy was going to do, I was right on him. He took a couple steps into my lane, luckily, nobody was next to me, and I just missed him. He was clearly on a suicide march.

 

On the original topic, 10-12 yrs to go. I am looking right now for a dispatch type job outside of the truck. If it comes, great, if not, then so be it. Private fleet. Leave Monday get home Friday.

 

Plan? There is no plan!

 

Not to have a plan, is a plan.

 

Got my CDL as soon as I was legally able and cut and ran out of the cesspool known as the south as soon as I could.

Went into trucking knowing how the industry was coming from many truckers as my elders. Did local flatbed/rgn, then otr reefer, then regional food tanker, then jumped into LTL with around 7 years exp. (Highest point in my career.) Job market and freight volumes went and cratered into the ground. 2 hour work days pushing brooms and emptying trash cans. Laid off this past spring. Jumped to fuel this year after 4 months unemployed. Signed on with a garbage company that paid absolutely nothing and stole wages on top of that. Quit them and went back to regional food tanker doing backbreaking manual labor again.

I'm 30, developing some chronic genetic health issues, own basically nothing and am making a lot less money for a lot harder work than the LTL gravy train. No family, friends, hobbies, nuthin. The old timers warned me and I didn't listen. Should have, those crabby old ######## knew something.

All that being said, a lot of the kids I grew up around that went to college and did the "right thing" are barely making 50-60k/yr and living at home or are facing layoffs with AI since they are in the white collar desk jockey world. So who knows, ain't no clankers going to be chaining up anytime soon and driving through a blizzard. At least I have some savings and no debt.

If I could, I'd change careers but I could buy a house in a couple years and probably be able to make the payments and weather the downturns of trucking. Not many millenials/gen z can say that unless they have daddy's money or a spouse making a lot. Too many variables to change career paths right now. A whole lot of white collar jobs are going to vanish in 5-10 years when the kinks get ironed out with AI. Paralegals, accountants, data entry/analysis, finance, help desk, low level IT, lab techs, pharmacists, hospitality, etc are all going to be facing mass layoffs. Trucking is going to suffer along with the whole job market. A fundamental change in human history is about to unfurl. We are just on the precipice of it. It's not going to be AI robot killing machines slaughtering people for fun. It's going to be man against his brother for wages. Omniscient surveillance suffocating the human experience.

I think I'll stay where I am for the time being. Even if I hate it.

 

I was born into trucking. I’d like to leave still being involved in some capacity. Not driving necessarily, but in some form

 

My old Terminal Manager at Yellow gave me the chance to get out of driving and into the management side, took it and haven't looked back. Still keep the CDL active just in case, always loved the driving part but not everything else that came with it.