Find your second greatest love (for students who are not sure who they want to be)

Telling people you major in Writing Seminars and English is kind of like confiding a shameful secret to a complete stranger, like introducing yourself by saying, “Hi, I park diagonally in the garage since my spouse left me.” The other person isn’t convinced you’re making what they would consider a good life decision, but they can’t express outright disapproval either.

When the nurse at my last doctor’s appointment found herself in this position, all she said was, “Well, more power to you.”

They pray I become something respectable, like a college professor; I may be broke but at least I’m smart, pretentious and broke. When I further confess that I’m not certain academia is for me — a true train gone off the track by this point — all civility has dissipated.

Someone once told me, “It used to be that you had to know what you were doing with your life to get into a college like that.”

As Hopkins students, we’re familiar with the college admissions lingo that became our Bible, guiding us to the pearly gates of these ivory towers. All four years of high school, you need to develop your “spike,” which becomes your intended major. Because colleges are money-making businesses that prepare you to do the same, your major should evolve into your career.

But if your spike becomes your major, which then becomes your career, and if you need to develop your spike throughout high school, then — in a nightmarish application of the transitive property — many of us have been cornered into nailing down a career when we’re in middle school.

Everything thereafter is one chase toward the light at the end of our tunnel visions, which often proves to be a train as we realize that a great deal of personal change has precipitated between middle school and adulthood. We no longer want to be whatever we thought sounded cool at 13.

When we overstay our welcome in the husk of our youth and are forced to grow up like a hermit crab upgrading its shell, how do we introduce our childlike desires to our adult needs? The answer demands a reckoning with the truth of our society.

Take the familiar term “work/life balance” — innocuous at first but loaded beneath the surface. The word “life,” which we know as a catchall for biological functions like breathing to advanced mechanisms like contemplation, is truly synonymous with something like “free time.” Therefore, perhaps skipping a few steps, one may say that life — or the meaning of life — is what one does in their free time. Everything else, particularly how we make money in order to fund the basic necessities of life, falls under work.

It is also through this microscopic analysis of language that one may realize it is impossible for life’s purpose to be work because work and free time inherently contradict one another; if free time is defined as time spent not working, then the two may never intersect.

We cannot live for our work. So, to arrive at the work suitable to us, we must first understand what the purpose of our individual life is — daunting, I know.

What would you be happy doing with no external motivation? No pay, no praise — only the thing that will keep you busy and happy by itself. That is the meaning of your life. It doesn’t have to be academic, like a subject you love researching (though it can be) — it can also be socializing or the prospect of starting a family.

You may have heard the phrase, “If you love what you do, then you’ll never work a day in your life.” Repackaging the same idea as a counterargument for itself, like snake venom slipped in the antidote, I offer: If your work is what you love, then every day of your life will be work. That is, if you want to live a happy life, which I assume you do.

By that I mean: If you take the one thing you enjoy by itself and turn it into work, then you’ve colonized your free time and life’s meaning with work. If you love to read and choose a job that’s full of reading, after a long day of work, will you still want to come home and read? If so, will it still be the same?

This doesn’t mean that one must hate their work or be incapable of enjoying it. Rather, one should examine oneself and pinpoint the thing they enjoy but would not do in their free time given other, more enjoyable options. Pick that one.

While I’ve already called the hackneyed “If you love what you do, then you’ll never work a day in your life” platitude into action, let me introduce one more aphorism, one that I’ve taken credence to perhaps more than reason in my first year of college: “Live in the moment.”

My outline of career and personal fulfillment — of work and life — isn’t meant to seem either/or. Rather, the call to “pick” work implies the ability to have both forms of fulfillment. However, if life should be too short and one must make a choice, which would you choose: work or life?

The seen-in-media stereotype of miserable pre-med students majoring in some subject they hate but whose only dreams are to become doctors may hit close to home. Most of these same students, though white coat-destined, are also avid intellectuals who love learning for the sake of learning and have interests beyond the subjects on the MCAT. Given the choice, they may desire to pick majors other than Molecular and Cellular Biology or Neuroscience, but they persevere through the coursework believing that it’s the “correct” path.

Again, the nagging and existential worry: What if life should be too short? It only seems natural to grieve these hypothetical students who exchanged the young, primary real estate of their lives for IOUs promising to swap their momentary suffering for eventual career satisfaction. 

The nagging worry’s soft response, the solution: “Live in the moment.” By pursuing what one knows to be pleasurable in the moment — within reason — then it is possible to first secure personal fulfillment, then chase career satisfaction. Has anyone who has led a happy life then died miserable because they weren’t 100 percent satisfied with their career, or is it more often that people die miserable but satisfied with their career because they realize too late that they never prioritized a happy life? This, to make a long story short, is how I came to be every parent’s worst nightmare: a child majoring in Writing Seminars and English with no concrete plan for his future. At least I’m happy.

Your work should be your second greatest love. Work/life balance is like a marriage. If you barrel toward lifelong commitment with your “first love,” or what you think your first love is, without slowing to check yourself, then one day you will come home to find that your first love has vanished and you’re parking diagonally in the garage and telling a stranger about it.

You’re home alone. Your first love is at work.

Riley Strait is a sophomore majoring in Writing Seminars and English from Olathe, Kan. He is an Arts & Entertainment Editor for The News-Letter.