Early last year, the investigative journalist Jodi Kantor was asked to give the commencement address to students at Columbia University in New York. The place was in chaos – amid continuing pro-Palestinian protests students were expelled, or arrested and detained by immigration officials, while President Trump had ordered a $400m withdrawal of federal funding (which was later reinstated as part of a settlement with the administration). Kantor was “horrified” to see what had happened at Columbia – her alma mater, where she was sacked from her first journalism job at the student paper– “a place and campus I loved, a place that stands for discussion and ideas and progress. I said: ‘I’ll do it if I can speak to the students first.’”

She spoke to several. They didn’t want to talk about Israel or Gaza, or Trump, or what was happening at the university and its implications for free speech. “They said: ‘Our class, despite all of its political differences, is united in anxiety over one question. When everything feels so broken, how do we start? How do we find our life’s work in this environment?’”

These questions, she says, “seized me” and that commencement address inspired her book, How to Start, written in the early mornings before she’d go to her job as a reporter at the New York Times. It’s a short and punchy read, full of practical and wise advice aimed at young people, but which anyone from midlife career switchers to those who suspect they’re on the wrong path might find helpful.

It came out of a period of transition in Kantor’s own life. Around the same time, Kantor was diagnosed with breast cancer and successfully treated; her daughter left for college; and she turned 50. “Those all happened in a flash. Like, tick-tock, do it now, don’t wait.” She was surprised to find herself in the middle of writing an advice book – this is a journalist who exposed the sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, and for the past few years has been investigating the US supreme court – but she felt called to do it. “If there are five young people in the universe who would be helped by this book, I want to act on that.”

Although she flinches a little – in the book, and in person – about making it too much about her, Kantor says her cancer diagnosis encouraged her to write this book, to meander away from her serious newspaper reporting and “connect to readers on a different level. I feel like the subtext of my journalism is always, like, we can find answers, and I wanted to make that text.”

Kantor couldn’t stop thinking about the Columbia students, a generation she describes as “battered”, and how different their early working life would be to hers. It wasn’t unfamiliar territory; Kantor’s older daughter is 20 (she has another, who is 10). “She and her friends were asking the same questions. The dining table where I’m sitting,” she says – we’re talking over Zoom, Kantor at home in Brooklyn – “is a counselling spot for my daughter’s friends.”

As a reporter, employment had largely been Kantor’s beat. Her Weinstein reporting, with her colleague Megan Twohey, kickstarted the global #MeToo movement – she and Twohey, along with Ronan Farrow, shared the Pulitzer prize – but even that, she points out, was “about work, and it was about entry-level work”. (Many of the women who were assaulted were vulnerable partly because they were at early stages in their careers.)

After their Weinstein investigation, Kantor and Twohey were invited to many university campuses to speak. “What I saw year after year was that the fear and the cynicism were rising. Even though starting your career is a time of struggle, it’s also a time of ambition, experimentation and optimism, and I saw that change in social attitudes. I saw dread, anxiety. Even students who were at very prestigious universities did not feel equipped.” Wider culture changed, too, she points out. “You can even see it in the TV shows – we went from Parks and Recreation and The Office, which, even though they showed slightly dysfunctional work environments, still showed colleagues as family. And now we have Severance, which is this very dark take on work.”

Isn’t the employment landscape dark, though? How can a young person, perhaps freshly hatched from university, battle the forces of global economics and the AI onslaught, while questioning the futility of a “career” amid the prospect of nuclear war and environmental collapse? Kantor has done much reporting on brutal modern work practices, such as Amazon’s close monitoring of employees and its scrutiny of the performance of some of those who had experienced life-threatening illnesses. How do we avoid accepting that this is the future of work?

“I think the question is: what agency do we have for the future? There is a constant stream of negative news, whether through the media or people’s group chats, about how hard it is to get a job, to get a good job, the fear that classic entry-level jobs are going to be obliterated by AI. We can’t change that environment, but we can say to young people: you’re not a statistic. It’s important to educate yourself in what’s going on, but those news reports aren’t sentences, you’re still the author of your own life. Let’s at least try to put together an escape plan from what other people are telling you is inevitable.” She hopes, she says, it doesn’t sound “Pollyannaish. I wrote it as a counterweight to what I believe has become a dominant and damaging set of messages.”

It is not a book for quiet quitters, though Kantor understands their impulse. “There are a lot of people who just want to do the minimum, dissociate emotionally, leave at 5pm and your real life begins. I get that. That is, in many ways, a rational response to our current circumstances.” She smiles. “Those people are not my people. This book is for people who want to fight for a shot at their ambitions.”

In Kantor’s view, the two main challenges to a fulfilling work life are working out what you want to do, and then working out how to do it. For the first, she suggests getting out your notebook and observing. “I know it sounds like a cheesy journalling exercise, but as you go about your life, your classes, your after-school job, your extracurricular activities, think: what tasks do I enjoy and feel drawn to? Which do I really hate? What kinds of people am I gravitating to? Everyone’s feeling a lot of anxiety and negativity. The problem is those are not terribly good guides. They’re deceptive. How many times has each of us freaked out about something, only for it to end up fine? Also, you don’t want your life’s compass to be dread.” Positive emotions, she thinks, “tend to be reliable in terms of pushing you in the right direction”.

In a cost-of-living crisis, burdened by huge student debt, and with home ownership a distant dream for many young people, clinging to financial stability is a rational response. “I get it,” says Kantor. “However, the problem with that is you don’t really get anywhere in life without taking on some risk. So, while I would never judge anyone who feels as if they have to make every last dollar, I want them to understand the trade-offs, and ask some questions to lead them to think about the upside of taking on some risk as well.”

In our societies, there is “an assumption that’s crept in that the pursuit of riches should be everybody’s aim. I don’t think that’s true.” In Kantor’s book, one of the happiest people who followed their dream career is a modestly earning historian. “Do I want young people to struggle and not be able to live someplace decent, or pay for their children’s clothing? Of course not. One of the primary goals of working is to protect yourself financially. But I want to make a distinction, to say that goal is very different [from] deciding that the way you’re going to structure all of your hours is in pursuit of the largest possible house.”

In terms of creating a dream career, much of Kantor’s advice revolves around making human connections, as a way of bypassing faceless and depressing AI recruitment systems. Applying for a job has always been daunting, but now it’s increasingly lonely, too. Kantor makes no claim to know what the future of employment will look like, but she puts a lot of faith into the ideas of craft (the skills that will always belong to you, not a company) and need (what the rest of us are willing to buy from you, or what society will benefit from), “which I believe, even in a bad environment, will maximise chances of happiness and success.”

Kantor grew up in Staten Island, and later New Jersey, where her mother stayed at home with the children and her father was an estate agent. Kantor’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors. She was born 30 years, almost to the day, after they had been liberated from camps in 1945, the first grandchild in the family.

“I was raised with an almost crushing sense of responsibility, but also a lot of meaning.” She takes a long pause. “In retrospect, the questions of investigative journalism were all around me. I lived in a world of Holocaust survivors – I thought everybody’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors. How could this thing have happened? Who enabled it? Why didn’t anybody stop it? What was the system? Also: who speaks and who doesn’t? Because there are two kinds of Holocaust survivors. There are the kind who are unable to speak about what happened and are completely closed-up, and then there are the talkers. My grandfather was the first kind. He was quite haunted and had trouble speaking about his experiences.”

Her grandmother, Hana, who died three years ago at the age of 99, was the opposite. “For the majority of my lifetime, I’ve been in conversation with somebody who spoke very openly about what she had gone through. What I saw was that the talkers were much better off in the long-term, without question.” Her grandmother had a huge impact on Kantor’s outlook. “It was an amazing experience of recovery, because I saw my grandmother become the happiest person I knew, and so it made me kind of a permanent optimist – I was watching, on a day-to-day or weekly basis, a genocide victim find her way back to life and really thrive into old age.”

As a child, when the New York Times arrived every day, Kantor devoured it: “It was like a message from another world.” But it never occurred to her that she could become a journalist. After Columbia, where she studied history, Kantor went to Harvard Law School. If it was a big deal to get a place at Harvard, it was an even bigger deal to drop out, but she just couldn’t ignore her desire to pursue journalism. She got a job at the online magazine Slate, then joined the New York Times as arts editor, before becoming a reporter.

In investigative journalism, Kantor found something that fulfilled the sense of responsibility she has felt since childhood. “I’m very close with a lot of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. There’s an enormous bond. You grow up with survivor guilt, like: ‘Why did my family live?’ You grow up with a real responsibility to …” She pauses. “I think what others could easily mistake as ambition is really a desire to make good on what I’ve been given, and have a fruitful and responsible use of this amazing chance at life, that I somehow got away with.”

What is it like to be a New York Times journalist in the era of Trump? “There’s tremendous meaning,” says Kantor. “There’s so much purpose.” For the past four years her work has focused on illuminating the US supreme court. “It was long considered in journalism a locked box, and what my colleagues and I are trying to do is build a new system of covering the court. How do you scrutinise the supreme court justices? What does it mean to hold this much power for 20 or 30 years at a time with no accountability? What does it do to you? How partisan are they really? Why did they decide to award President Trump such sweeping immunity?”

Kantor loves her work and wants us to find work we love, too. She isn’t promising it will be easy, especially now, but she wants us to believe it’s achievable. “If you give up your search for satisfaction at the outset of your journey, the likelihood that you’re ever going to get there is very small – you have put happiness further out of reach. Don’t give up before you start.”

How to Start by Jodi Kantor (Bloomsbury, £14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply