If you major in anything that isn’t STEM, you’ve probably heard from someone that you won’t get a job, are going to make approximately $2 per year, or will die in the streets with only an English thesis to your name and no notable achievements.
I’m here to tell you that none of what you’ve heard is true. Your major is valuable and you should be able to major in something you enjoy regardless of whether it’s Computer Science or Philosophy.
I major in both Biology and Religious Studies. I major in those subjects because I enjoy learning about them. The reactions people have to learning I major in those subjects are very different. When they learn my major is Biology, it’s all fine, it’s a good major, it’s important. But Religious Studies? Useless, weird, and futureless.
Most of the adults I know don’t have careers that even remotely relate to what their college majors were. The reason you go to a liberal arts college is to explore multiple subjects and how they relate to each other, not to focus on a single subject with no regard for the others. People will hire you because they know you have good skills in multiple areas, not because you can do one thing really well.
Also, do you want to be miserable your whole life? Why major in something that might have good money in it if you hate it? So you’ll get a job you also hate? Money is nice, but if the rest of your life is spent hating your job just for some dough, you really haven’t lived. Plus, everything changes so fast in our technologically accelerated world that nobody can be sure of what’s going to be a useful area of study in the next decades. Why worry yourself over a future nobody knows?
Capitalism convinces us that certain knowledge is important while other knowledge is useless. That’s just not true. All knowledge is power. Do what you enjoy and I promise you that you’ll find a future of your own. You do not need to kneel to capitalism to have a life; you need to do what you need to do to feel human. And if that’s Religious Studies, English, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, whatever, then so be it.