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Phrase: Between a rock and a hard place
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Young people are between a rock and a hard place today.
The decisions they have to make about what career to pursue, what educational institution to attend and how much debt to take on are seemingly impossible.
Let’s say a young person in their last year of high school wants to study education and become a teacher.
With the declining birthrate and ageing societies of developed nations, that may not be the best decision.
So, if you can’t do what you want to do, how do you choose something else?
That’s what it means to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.
We often have to choose between two equally undesirable choices.
Young people should not choose a career for the current times.
They should choose one that will be in demand twenty years from when they graduate.
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The challenge is that when you’re seventeen years old, 20 years seems like a lifetime away.
Let’s say this young person decides to become an educator.
When they graduate from university, they are unable to find a job.
Do they re-enter university to pursue a master’s degree, take a part-time job while continuing the job search, or pivot and do something completely different?
Now they are stuck between a rock and a hard place and a very angry dog.
Making the wrong decision may negatively influence the rest of their lives.
Then again, maybe it’s not so impossible after all.
In life, things have an uncanny way of working themselves out.
Being caught between a rock and a hard place may be the normal state of affairs for all of us.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 71.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.