Congratulations on some interesting life experience at a young age.
While working hard has its place, so does focusing on friends and fun at a young age, there's enough time to be a grown up, and most people end up missing their carefree teenage and early-20s years.
My suggestion, buy a backpack, a ticket to south-east Asia, and following the banana pancake trail for a little while. You'll decouple, find friends easy, have fun, relax, and become ready for your next steps.
I believe that overall the decision is a good one, there are no real good reasons why cannabis should be prohibited.
At the same time, I strongly hope that the cannabis smokers will be considerate of the people around them. It is quite a foul smell if you are not partaking yourself.
Consider the cost of the lifestyle you want, and pick something that allows you to afford it.
Consider the lifestyle you want. Some jobs require constant learning, or considerable overtime, and leave little room for life.
Consider topics you find at least a little interesting, they don't have to be the thing you find the most interesting, but it must be good enough to get out of bed in the morning.
Consider interests that you're OK losing. Sometimes a good hobby is better or more fun as a hobby, than as a career choice.
Consider the place or environment you want to work in. Cubicle life, outside, small companies, large corporations, high cost of living places, etc.
Consider subjects you can be above average good at.
All in all, this is hard to do, because typically when people make such choices for the first time, they lack the life experience that allows them to evaluate the importance of the different factors.
It's a good idea to try and visit many companies in the fields you're considering, many companies will be open to that. Watch the people, see what they look like. Are they happy, active, excited, subdued, silent, bored, divorced, .... and consider whether you want to look like them in 20 years.
But maybe the most important, if you don't like your choice many years down the road, it's OK to change you know.
My warm water heater is part of my heating system and keeps 60-100 liters of hot water available throughout the day.
I now run it only between 6AM and 2PM. This has not affected our comfort level, as we have a full boiler at 2PM, but it avoids the system turning on every ~2 hours to top up the warm water.
Just this change has resulted in over 10% savings on the yearly electricity bill.
We are already seeing the same result of LLMs, with sci-fi magazines (temporarily) no longer accepting submissions and self-publication platforms such as Amazon's being flooded with auto-generated crap.
Hustle culture is part of it, but only one part of what I believe will be a negative outcome for society.
As AI systems display inherent bias, and it is possible to train for that bias (e.g. RightwingGPT), we have essentialy weaponized content generation, and we have no scaleable mechanisms such as fact checking to combat it.
Whether it is low-quality work, spam, disinformation, outright manipulation, copyright violations, or other forms of negative results, we have automated the ability to produce it.
While working hard has its place, so does focusing on friends and fun at a young age, there's enough time to be a grown up, and most people end up missing their carefree teenage and early-20s years.
My suggestion, buy a backpack, a ticket to south-east Asia, and following the banana pancake trail for a little while. You'll decouple, find friends easy, have fun, relax, and become ready for your next steps.
Best of luck.