What are you going to do with that?

For those of you who don’t know that much about me, I’m currently attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I just finished my first year. I’m planning to major in mathematics, though as of current I haven’t officially declared this. (But don’t let that fact make you think I’m not certain—I am, which is all well and good, as I’ve successfully nailed down 50% of the major’s requirements already.) I think all college students face these two questions, but as a math major, I feel like some people are a little more puzzled—they raise their eyebrows a little higher than if I were doing something like business or engineering. But I frequently encounter these inquiries: Why math? And, “What are you going to do with that?”

I have two automatic answers to both questions, tidied away for these situations. I think I come off a little fresh and a lot closed, which I realize and believe is “wrong” and unfriendly, but it’s the weathered result of telling the truth and getting dull stares as a response. So, why math? Because it’s easy, I always say. Or, with a slight shrug, Eh, I just figure it’s the easiest thing. So I come off as smug, because even though the question seems innocent enough, I often feel as if I’ve got to ward off a kind of, “wtf math?” have-fun-going-back-to-middle-school attitude. I think in good conversation, an answer does better raising a new question than answering the one at hand, but in this case, I don’t leave it at all obvious what that next question is.

When I say easy, I don’t mean without hard work. I rarely think of things in term of work; I usually just consider things in terms of enjoyment. Majoring in math is easy for me because I enjoy it immensely, and I’m convinced that I’ll enjoy pursuing a math major more than I would with a different discipline (I feel like there’s a slight asterisk I could put here, where I recall my interest in music production, but I won’t discuss that now).

So why math, really? Joy alone can’t be enough to justify spending four years primarily focusing on one subject, or at least it can’t justify singling out one subject out of a handful that I thoroughly enjoy. Well, what I mean by, It’s the easiest thing, is that a math major allows me to sacrifice the least amount of time that I would like to spend on other interests. Since elementary school until about halfway through high school, I was convinced I would go to college and major in English. My plan changed, because I realized that what I loved about reading and writing just wasn’t what I would be doing if I were to study English in college. I read about a quarter of the assigned books in high school because I felt so annoyed by the way literature was taught in school. If I majored in English, I’d have to spend years doing assignments I thought were silly, and on top of that, I’d want to devote more personal time to the reading and writing that I’d want to do. It’d just be a major time-suck for me, and I’d likely feel guilty, and rarely satisfied and productive. I would like to say that two of my best friends happen to be English majors at Smith College, and I do indeed respect them both immensely for what they’re studying. And I think college English courses can be less hokey-pokey (by this, I mean “absolute nonsense”) than what I got at my high school, and that I would actually enjoy an English major quite a bit (definitely much more than I would have let on at the peak of my resistance to hand in homework during high school). So yes, I would enjoy it, but right now, not at the expense of all the Englishy-stuff I didn’t want to do, and not at the expense of a math major.

I feel lucky that I enjoy math so much. Because you can’t really cut it any other way: math is math. You can’t corrupt numbers the way you can corrupt literature, music, film, and art. I don’t want to imply that math isn’t creative but I don’t think I do, since creative doesn’t mean without rules. So you see where I’m going: by making math my primary focus in school, I feel productive and happy because I love math and I’m actually doing it and enjoying it. I don’t feel guilty at the end of the day because I wasted all my time and still feel like I haven’t properly done anything. And that, to me, is what makes majoring in math easy.

And now onward to: What are you going to do with that? How do you plan to use your degree?

Here’s what I usually say, and what is mostly true: Nothing. And, I don’t.

What I’d like to communicate in this post is that I’m a firm believer that, when done properly, everything is an end in itself. Of course, we could get all specific and argue little, silly things such as reading a word is a means to reading a sentence is a means to reading a paragraph, but let’s not argue for the sake of it, and think practically. At this point in my life, I would say that true happiness is being always content with the rate at which time is passing, and never wishing moments to pass more slowly or more quickly. That happens when you stop thinking of your life as a string of means to accompanying ends.

Think of reading a book. You feel satisfied when you finish, sure. But the joy you feel from reading doesn’t come all at the end. If you’re doing it right, you’re enjoying it all the way through. Every chapter isn’t a means toward the end of understanding the whole story, or another box you’ve got to check to say you’ve read a new book. The classes I take aren’t a means to a degree. A degree is a nice thing to have, but I’m not doing this so one day I can use my degree to get a job. Here’s another thing I believe: degrees can help, but degrees don’t get jobs. Or do much of anything. People do those things. My college education isn’t something I’m getting now to use later; I like to think that I’m always using it, and always will be. If I never do anything related to my math major after I graduate, I doubt I’ll feel as if getting the degree was a waste of resources. I’ll feel that I used it because, if nothing else, I enjoyed the process of getting it every day, and I think that alone is more than enough. I think too many people think of their lives as things that start or end at certain times, and lose sight of the fact that joy is supposed to be constant.

We don’t read books expecting that it’s gonna suck the whole way through, but the end will be worth it, and (what’s more) no one tries to write a book like that. I definitely believe in sacrifice, as in giving something up in exchange for something greater. And I’m not at all trying to promote that we blind ourselves to the responsibility of the future in pursuit of instant pleasure. I believe in trudging through the chapters that don’t make sense, listening to the whole album, watching to the end of the movie. There’s a difference between giving something up because it’s straight up bad, and because it challenges to extend yourself a little bit. I’m saying that every moment is important, and moreover, that every moment being important doesn’t in some way imply that since all moments are important, no moments are.

I’m not getting a math major because it has potential to sound and be fancy, to get me somewhere. I’m happy because I believe it’s a versatile major, but being completely honest with you all, right now when I picture my life after graduation, I picture getting a cheap apartment, a part-time job, and either starting or joining a rock band. The question just doesn’t make sense to me: what are you going to do with that? To me it’s like asking, “What are you going to eat for breakfast two Thursdays from now, and how, specifically, will doing that nourish you with the energy you’ll need to go about your day?” I have respect for people who know what they’re going to do, and I have appreciation for goal-setting and for commitment, but at the same time, it’s important to realize that you don’t need a reason or a purpose, rather, to do something that’s separate from just doing it. I like the end result of being fit, and when I’m exercising, I thoroughly enjoy every moment of it, both for what it is, and because I can feel it’s getting me somewhere. There are no contradictions there.

When I was younger, I believed that getting dressed was something I did when I had somewhere to go. Otherwise, I reasoned, why waste clean clothes? I might want to wear them later. Now I’ve come to realize that it’s mostly the other way around. I waste more saving my clean clothes than I do having a little more dirty laundry. I find that I don’t shower and get dressed every morning because I have something to do, but rather that I am dressed, and therefore I have things to do.