A Piece to the Puzzle of Happiness
What do you want to be when you grow up? What are you going to do when you graduate? What do you want to do with your degree? Questions I keep hearing recycle themselves over and over in the course of casual conversation and most of the time with the same people asking them. Probably because my answer changes so much, they can’t remember what it was last time they asked and it was nothing so significant that they would remember.
The truth is I don’t know what I want to be or want to do. Besides the time while playing little league baseball when I wanted to be a baseball player, there has never been one thing that I really wanted to do as a career choice. Coming to college I decided that I wanted to challenge myself. I chose the biomedical engineering curriculum here at Tech. Overloading my schedule with 13 and 14 hours several quarters my freshman year, I breezed by with flying colors. I soon realized that I could do anything I put effort into and set high aims for medical school. Summer after my sophomore year, I realized that the medical route did not interest me enough. I though of some practical occupations: law, medicine, and engineering and none of them gripped me with passion. All are career options that I seriously considered pursuing but never found contentment in. So I began seeing a career counselor. Like many other things in life, I found that my analytical thinking left the counselor with little advice. I was just looking for answers in which he couldn’t provide.
It was during this time however that made me start wondering why it was that I was having such a hard time deciding on a career choice. College teaches practical and realistic lessons of success in life. It mostly produces the run-of-the-mill citizen that benefits society in a very practical and realistic way. Outside college advice that I often hear is that I should do something that I love to do. I should choose something that will make me happy. Well, then I’m afraid that college doesn’t offer me anything. I’m afraid that what makes me happy is not taught in the classroom. Upon thinking about the things I love to do they are neither practical jobs nor things that I can make money doing. College doesn’t nurture those kind of wild and nonconforming ideas about your future, ideas that don’t require a boss or job title, ideas that I have been experiencing a lot lately. Thoreau would tell me to throw off the shackles of conformity and pursue my natural desires. I often find myself trying to listen to that but not knowing how to do it.
Just yesterday I was reading a special issue of Men’s Journal while waiting to get my hair cut. “The Top One Hundred Best Adventures” was the title that locked me in. One guy rafted the entire stretch of the Amazon River. While on the adventure he lost his mates for 12 days and ate bird embryos to survive. Another guy is traveling the vast Siberian artic desert Genghis Kahn style after taking a few horse riding lessons before hand. Along the way he has gotten attacked by horse thieves, stole the horses back, and picked up a local dog that was following him and adopted it as his new best friend. Another guy is running, biking and swimming 6000 miles. I am willing to bet that every one of the people in the stories I read about, at some point read Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn and felt that same passion for adventure I did. So why can’t I raft the Amazon and trek the Siberian desert? That would make me happy. Because society and college teaches that we have to get a job. It teaches that we have a successful career to find happiness. And I listen to this too. I find myself doing what they teach by starting to pursue a career, making resumes and cover letters, and spending my summers trying to get on-the-job experience.
Hold on! What about my big dreams of adventure. If I get a job, then wife and family soon follows. Where will I fit in my crazy schemes of attempting Everest or Argentinean base jumping between the job and changing diapers? When will I have time to fulfill the adventurous hunger aches that make me happy?
Lately, I have been stopping to smell the roses and taking in a deep breath of morning freshness on my walk to class and exhaling the burdens of responsibility. I don’t feel such pressure to advance life anymore. As for now, I think I will not get a real job directly out of college. I might move to the west coast or Boston and wait tables. I might take every cent I have to buy a good backpack and a plane ticket to Europe and enjoy the conversations with people I meet along the way. I might even build a sailboat and sail to Tahiti. But regardless of exactly what it is I do, I will satisfy this hunger and passion for adventure before I engage in the hustle-and-bustle they call “the real world,” adding another piece to my puzzle of happiness.
The truth is I don’t know what I want to be or want to do. Besides the time while playing little league baseball when I wanted to be a baseball player, there has never been one thing that I really wanted to do as a career choice. Coming to college I decided that I wanted to challenge myself. I chose the biomedical engineering curriculum here at Tech. Overloading my schedule with 13 and 14 hours several quarters my freshman year, I breezed by with flying colors. I soon realized that I could do anything I put effort into and set high aims for medical school. Summer after my sophomore year, I realized that the medical route did not interest me enough. I though of some practical occupations: law, medicine, and engineering and none of them gripped me with passion. All are career options that I seriously considered pursuing but never found contentment in. So I began seeing a career counselor. Like many other things in life, I found that my analytical thinking left the counselor with little advice. I was just looking for answers in which he couldn’t provide.
It was during this time however that made me start wondering why it was that I was having such a hard time deciding on a career choice. College teaches practical and realistic lessons of success in life. It mostly produces the run-of-the-mill citizen that benefits society in a very practical and realistic way. Outside college advice that I often hear is that I should do something that I love to do. I should choose something that will make me happy. Well, then I’m afraid that college doesn’t offer me anything. I’m afraid that what makes me happy is not taught in the classroom. Upon thinking about the things I love to do they are neither practical jobs nor things that I can make money doing. College doesn’t nurture those kind of wild and nonconforming ideas about your future, ideas that don’t require a boss or job title, ideas that I have been experiencing a lot lately. Thoreau would tell me to throw off the shackles of conformity and pursue my natural desires. I often find myself trying to listen to that but not knowing how to do it.
Just yesterday I was reading a special issue of Men’s Journal while waiting to get my hair cut. “The Top One Hundred Best Adventures” was the title that locked me in. One guy rafted the entire stretch of the Amazon River. While on the adventure he lost his mates for 12 days and ate bird embryos to survive. Another guy is traveling the vast Siberian artic desert Genghis Kahn style after taking a few horse riding lessons before hand. Along the way he has gotten attacked by horse thieves, stole the horses back, and picked up a local dog that was following him and adopted it as his new best friend. Another guy is running, biking and swimming 6000 miles. I am willing to bet that every one of the people in the stories I read about, at some point read Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn and felt that same passion for adventure I did. So why can’t I raft the Amazon and trek the Siberian desert? That would make me happy. Because society and college teaches that we have to get a job. It teaches that we have a successful career to find happiness. And I listen to this too. I find myself doing what they teach by starting to pursue a career, making resumes and cover letters, and spending my summers trying to get on-the-job experience.
Hold on! What about my big dreams of adventure. If I get a job, then wife and family soon follows. Where will I fit in my crazy schemes of attempting Everest or Argentinean base jumping between the job and changing diapers? When will I have time to fulfill the adventurous hunger aches that make me happy?
Lately, I have been stopping to smell the roses and taking in a deep breath of morning freshness on my walk to class and exhaling the burdens of responsibility. I don’t feel such pressure to advance life anymore. As for now, I think I will not get a real job directly out of college. I might move to the west coast or Boston and wait tables. I might take every cent I have to buy a good backpack and a plane ticket to Europe and enjoy the conversations with people I meet along the way. I might even build a sailboat and sail to Tahiti. But regardless of exactly what it is I do, I will satisfy this hunger and passion for adventure before I engage in the hustle-and-bustle they call “the real world,” adding another piece to my puzzle of happiness.
posted by Luke Lockwood at 5/14/2005 04:33:00 PM
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