Best-Of Advice

On a monumental mistake

This spring I’ll be graduating college. It’s taken 5 years, three degree changes and tens of thousands of dollars in loans before I found something I’m passionate about.

I’m slowly realizing I’m not passionate about it, though. I took it because it was easy and just thought-provoking enough to let me fool myself into thinking it was challenging. I feel like I’ve made a monumental mistake and am officially at a loss for what to do with my life. Thoughts?

Yep, you’ve made a monumental mistake. You’ve wasted five years and tens of thousands of dollars chasing what you thought was passion to earn a college degree that (if you’re lucky) will buy you a shitty entry level job where you can work your ass off for another five years trying to pay down those tens of thousands of dollars before one day in your late twenties it finally dawns on you that never, not once in your life, have you ever really been passionate about anything.

Of course, that part isn’t the monumental mistake. The monumental mistake is continuing to buy into the system. It’s believing you have to be passionate about some stupid college major, or that you feel like a failure because you haven’t mapped out exactly what you want to do with your entire life at an age when you’re barely qualified to answer phones and fetch coffee.

Fuck that shit. It’s perfectly okay to be clueless and terrified. The only wrong way to handle it is to freeze up and do nothing. The good news is that it doesn’t matter what you do with your life, and it sure as hell doesn’t matter what you studied in college. Just get the fuck out there and do something.

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