Sorry to inform you, but your "fate" is in the hands of others all day long, just to varying degrees.
Employment is a result of education, performance, attendance, experience, salary, market, skills, adaptability, health, opportunity, location, and market. You do everything to control the variables you can, but knowing that there are no guarantees is just as important as preparation.
No one at Kodak when I was young had any inkling their industry was toast.
Someone used to make phone booths.
You've just shifted your set of knowns and unknowns to another market with which you feel more secure, and that's fine. To each his own.
But don't delude yourself into believing you are secure. Financing, natural disaster, civil unrest, general unemployment, and a dozen other factors affect housing, all before the fact that any individual landlord can suffer cancer, car wreck, crime, and other mishaps that fate brings.
Yes, you reduced the odds of failure when you plan well, but never think the 1% probability won't be you. Maybe engineering felt too dicey to you, but there really are very few of them in the food banks and soup kitchens. It may have more to do with how much work is required, what kind, how well you work in teams, what your tolerance is for management and ineptmess, etc., rather than job stability.
It also matters how much cushion one has. I have a young friend who was an engineering intern in Albuquerque one summer. He was a native of Mexico originally, but his mother moved them to Pueblo, Colorado when his father was murdered by one of his embezzling employees. He took his engineering degree and then worked for some big firm in Denver. He hated it. I wouldn't doubt that part of that was the feeling of being someone else' bitch. HIs father hand owned a company before his murder.
But, my friend's mother took the money from the sale of that factory and bought real estate. She manages it quite well. My friend had the luxury of leaving his engineering path and following an entrepreneurial one. He and his partner have done well, and he now has a growing product line and sources suppliers from multiple locales in South and Central America. He's doing well, but I have to believe his ability to walk away from his security was because he had security outside his employment. A great many engineers do not. For them to leave their career without a good buffer, they risk total failure. For most, that is unacceptable.
When I first lived in Anchorage, I rented a room temporarily. My landlord was a Bostonian with a law degree who was running a bike rental business for tourists. He had done so for years. But, just prior to my arrival, the City of Anchorage began a program providing free public bikes in Anchorage for use as a city service, a sort of free rental. It certainly impacted his lifestyle, and he had no way of competing with it or winning his lawsuit against the city.
