There is a question that you will ask at least once in your life. It tends to happens when you are transitioning from childhood to adulthood, when you start looking to yourself for guidance rather than trying to find it in others. There will come a time that you will look at the world, starry-eyed and eager to make a difference, wondering how you will contribute to the world and make use of the qualities that make you unique.
This ultimately boils down into one simple four word question: what is your calling?
In order to find their calling, people go through phases of their lives where they explore the depths of their persona, trying to figure out what they like and want to do. But do your passions and desires always correlate to how you envision your life to be? For example, can a passion for social work go hand in hand with a desire to be rich, or to at least provide your family with a comfortable lifestyle?
When you take your primal needs into account, such eating (unless you eat free grass from Central Park), drinking (playgrounds have free water!), mating (who is gonna marry you if you are broke?) and reproduction (more kids = more beggars?), your passion might not seem to have a place in your future.
The standard of living that you picture yourself having might not be feasible if you follow your passions. It is a sad realization indeed when you find out that you will have to forsake your dreams for the harsh reality of your situation.
Why can you not just follow your passions, learn what you want and excel at it? Why must you sacrifice your passions for money and stability? Pieces of paper versus knowledge? Materialism versus intellect? Why is the world so unfair?
Now, some of you must be thinking: “Wow, this guy is pessimistic,” or “That is just how life is man, just work, struggle and get through it.” Call me idealistic, but there has to be a way to combine concern for your future and your unique interests and be happy through it. At least I would like to think there is.
Do you ever wonder why Stony Brook has so many pre-med students? If you ask many of them why they chose their career path, they will give you a bland answer, like, “I wanna help people.” But can you not help people through other fields? Almost every field has potential for helping humanity.
“But I wanna make people feel better,” could also be a response to that. But does everything not affect human health? For example, certain additives in foods affect bodies and minds. Even something seemingly distant, like the size of your dorm room and the amount of light that it gets, can affect your health by having adverse effects on your mood, such as mood swings and depression.
Now, let us just say for arguments sake that you were really good at interior design, which could help with the dorm room conundrum, but decided to go into something else. Why would you not pursue a career in this field if you are talented at doing it? Because of the seemingly small paycheck?
My point is that people tend to love the end result of things, but are not a fan of the journey to the end. To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” If you live for the destination, will the quality of your journey suffer?
Many people live for the end result and hate the journey. I know people that have said “Oh, I hate Chemistry,” or even worse, “I hate science,” when they are pre-med or engineering. Then please answer me this: why are you doing it? Is job security worth losing your peace of mind?
Okay, now let us say you give up the scientific field for your passion in Humanities-based studies, like philosophy. What to do with your knowledge after college? Pick up a job in a field not even related to your major (like finance, or worse, retail) and feel miserable in your job forever? So which peace of mind are you really sacrificing? For the pursuit of your passion in philosophy, did you give up a lucrative, satisfying career healing people or designing machines or buildings? So, using this logic, that must mean choosing stable careers like medicine would make sense, right?
Now, let us see it from the other side. Say in college you pursued medicine because of your undying desire to help people and for job stability, but you always loved reading about the deeper questions of life and analyzing them. You push these interests aside, dismissing them as hobbies and slave through one of the most grueling academic experiences ever.
Your eyes are set on the prize, the goal, and 11 years later, you have reached your destination: permanent placement in the specialty of your choice. You work there a few years, but then you feel burdened by the enormous regulations and restraints set by the hospitals, law and society upon you.
Research is not even an option for you because you did not even like the hard sciences to begin with, even though it was your major in your undergraduate years. You start to regret your decision more and more, and then you think back to your college years and remember your passion for philosophy and how your heart yearned to learn about and pursue that course of study, but instead, you took the safe route and went with medicine and majoring in what most pre-meds study: biology or chemistry, even though you never liked it much. Did you make the right choice?
Is there not a mid-life crisis in both these situations? Can this not be dismissed as a case of “the grass is always greener on the other side”? It could be, but there is that question that many people fail to ask themselves before pursuing a career: am I just romanticizing this discipline and loving the end result instead of the path to it? Or do I love what I am studying, the career and the path to it?
It is easy to say “Oh, I love this and I think it is so cool,” but do you really want to get to the bottom of this discipline? Do you want to know everything about it and is that thirst for its knowledge running through you? Do you want to know every single nitty-gritty detail about it?
These questions can make or break your hopes, dreams, you name it. But, it is better to get out of an unhealthy relationship (the most dedicated people end up “going out” with their careers, go figure) as early as possible. In other words, is your career more of the friends-with-benefits type or the long-term relationship type? You need to decide before you catch feelings and you have invested way too much irreplaceable time in it, while the whole time, there was a perfect partner out there.
When you ask yourself these questions, look at every perspective possible. Struggle with yourself until you have found it. You will find the middle ground between the qualities that make you unique and what you envision yourself doing in the future, just keep questioning and answering yourself. And mainly, do not be afraid to combine seemingly unrelated fields; you will be surprised that even the most different of fields can be intertwined in a unique way that only special people, like you, will know.
In fact, we might succeed even more when we pursue something we love, but from a different lens. For example, for people who are pre-med, you do not need to just do biology or chemistry, even if it is what medical schools teach their students. People who love mathematics might be able to look at the content of anatomy or biology from a mathematical point of view, quantifying and putting logic and order to the simplest of things. These people will succeed in what they are doing because the lens in which they are studying through is what they naturally like.
People who have a passion for philosophy and want to pursue economics can analyze the meaning behind opportunity cost and find out ways in which people tend to make decisions and figure something completely new out. The possibilities are actually limitless.
Even if you pursue something you would not enjoy on its own, the lens in which you look with it can help make or break your interest and passion. Chemistry might not be a good choice all on its own for someone who enjoys math, who probably would have been better off pursuing mathematics alongside the science; then, that person could see the mathematics behind chemistry and enjoy it more.
The hardest part is knowing through what lens you would like to learn your career’s knowledge; these are questions only you can answer because we all have different personalities and backgrounds. The noblest battle that we can fight is the battle within ourselves; by setting aside worries, anxieties and ideas that are figments of our adventurous imaginations, we will ultimately find ourselves. Fight and question yourself until you get a sense of your true calling, uncovering the truth of what your “self” will be contributing to the world and what your soul or conscience is happy doing. Do something no one has ever done before, representing your unique presence in the world.
Until we have the ideal society, where people who actually love chemistry will be the only ones pursuing it as part of their studies and when people pursue majors and courses of studies only if they love them with a passion, we will need to separate ourselves in this cutthroat world. Sadly, people get lost in the ocean of desire and material gain, and they lose themselves in the process, setting aside their unique qualities and real interests. They fail to realize that they can pursue something which will earn them a living and do something that they truly want to learn about. They forget how it feels to love the pursuit of knowledge, which is the biggest gift that has been given to us.
