“I hate my classes,” he starts, stabbing his burger with the blunt of his fork. “I was doing homework last night and I just stopped and realized how much I really hate them.”
It’s lunch and my friend is frowning down at his plate of assorted foods looking rather depressed.
“It’s my major really. Like I give zero shits about finance. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I just stare at all the graphs or whatever and just hate it so much.”
I tell him to change his major if he’s so unhappy. He’s a junior right now, but it’s not too late. Students change their major spring semester of their senior year. It happens.
But he just shrugs, “I want the money.”
And we leave it at that.
Why do we choose the major we choose? The simple common answer is we pursue what we enjoy. We find what makes us tick, what makes us happy and interested and just get really good at it. We learn everything we can about whatever we want and after four years, we go out and try to impress the world.
Another reason is to make the money.
Of course, money is huge. There is no doubt about that. Most of us graduate with no clue. We run around trying to find a job with about a billion loans to pay off (thanks college!). Suddenly that basic acting class seems damn useless when you’re sitting in your parents’ basement rubbing two pennies together and hoping that maybe 2.2 million dollars might bulldoze through the front door. The whole time you’re thinking, college really just f**ked me up.
But then, there are students who actually just want money. It’s their passion. Their goal. They want to live the American dream. To make the big bucks. Get the nice house and car and fly first class to Costa Rica for winter break while drinking Martinis served by a flirtatious hostess. They want it all. And it’s fine because money is great. It’s green and fun and sometimes comes in hard plastic cards. And we all know money buys happiness anyway so what’s the big deal?
So they major in finance and business and pre-med and law, and picture the promising future ahead of them. They struggle through Calculus II and that one accounting class half the students pass out in. They stare blankly at the drawing of the Endocrine system and wonder what it was like to feel joy. They learn what an Entrepreneurship pyramid is and even write one up. They wait and wait and count the days down until graduation. When the big bucks start adding up!
It’s cool. Major in money. You can pay off your loans and more while laughing at that music major living in a refrigerator box on the side of the road.
Oh, but by the way, the average worker works 7 to 9 hours a day. 7 to 9 hours. That’s 35 to 45 hours per week. 140 to 180 hours every month. That’s a lot of time to work on something. And what if you hate it? What if you stare at the graphs and charts and just hate it all? Then what?
Well, at least you can rub two hundred dollars together and call it good.