The Death of Hope

 Imagine this:

  You've just graduated High School, and are about to head off to college. After some time, you realize that you're dream is to major in something niche, something that is historically almost impossible to get a job in. Your counselor advises against it, your parents say they won't pay for college if you decide to pursue this. The thing is, you're certain that you only want to complete college if you go for this niche major, and you're already two years into debt, and you don't want to leave college without a degree. 

     So you go for it. You take all the classes, study like crazy, and graduate with a degree. But as the years go by, you begin to realize you won't be one of the lucky few in your field who lands a job. Whether it's because you lack talent, passion, or luck you don't know, but after several years with only low paying jobs, you realize you made a mistake. 

    The obvious thing to point out is that in this scenario you should have taken the advice of your counselor and gotten a degree with better odds of landing a job. But while I could counter that with the argument that even a degree in a high demand field doesn't guarantee a job, I'm instead going to ask a question. Why did we build a society where everyone has to go to college in order to get a degree and make them pay for the chance to go to college in the first place if most of the majors you can get at college have next to no chance of landing you a decent paying job out of college? Why did we decide to create a society where people have to go to college in the first place? 

     It's especially troubling when there's a common refrain among people to follow your dreams/passions. True, it's often countered by people pointing out that this is a bad idea, but I have to ask why, given that society punishes those who chose to follow their passions, we keep pushing for people to do this? Is it because of some deep scam buried at the bottom of society? Or does it have more to do with the fact that most of us don't want our lives to just be about doing whatever it takes to make money? Is this messaging built on the fact that most of us want more time to focus on who and what we love, and hate that society often takes that from us? Are we deluding ourselves into thinking society is a good place because without that delusion we'd loose all desire to live in it? 

   Is the problem that we follow our dreams, or that we keep punishing those who do?

   I confess, my opinion on this is colored by the fact that I can't live in society easily, and don't want to live in society as it is now at all. It doesn't help that I grew up being pushed down a very specific set of paths, but the older I got the more it became apparent that none of them were something I wanted to pursue. To put it simply, while I get that society needs to have rules in order to function, I feel like we've made those rules so restrictive that many can't live in society at all and almost none of us are allowed to be happy once we're in society. 

    What bothers me about this situations is that we're killing peoples belief in society. Society is only real so long as enough people believe it's real. You can't create society by just throwing a bunch of rules together and expecting people to follow them, you need to make rules they are willing to follow. If you want society to hold together, you need something people can believe in. Not because it's real, but because they think that it's real. So if you have a society where people are punished for believing, that society won't last long. 

   It's going to take a lot to restore faith in society, I'm very aware of that. But perhaps the best place to start is to find a way to change things so that people aren't punished for believing that things might get better some day.