What's with the five year plan?

I’m not sure we’re doing this right.

There are, as each of you reading this knows, several thousand different types of young students on this campus — beginning their lives, building their futures and recklessly having a good time every now and then.

But I wonder why we are all here.

I don’t mean in a grand, spiritual, existential sense, but in an average, why-did-you-choose-to-go-to-college-in-the-first-place sort of way.

I know, I know, this question makes me look like a fool at first.

Cameron, of course we all know why we are here. Duh.

Some of us just want better jobs in the future, some of us are pursuing a passion we have for chemistry or history or whatever.

Others still are slowly building a dream we feel we can’t live without.

I get all of that.
I just worry.

I worry that maybe we are all after a job we don’t want in the first place.
I worry that a passion we have is really somebody else’s.

That we borrowed it from somebody years ago, but we have fooled ourselves into believing it came from within.

I don’t want our dreams to turn into nightmares and doing something because “It’s what’s done.”

“It’s what people do” is probably the worst motivation in the world.

For the first time in 2011, Gallup found more people feel it’s unlikely our generation will fare better than the one ahead of us.At the same time, we are told liberal arts is dying, college debt is rising like never before and even if you go to college, you may never find a job.

This really concerns me, as I imagine it concerns you.

I find it ironic that a society that places a tremendous amount of value on higher education doesn’t seem to value it enough to hire its graduates.

To be fair, there are also a lot of college graduates who have great jobs, who made it, who have paid off their loans and who are doing something with their lives. But that’s not the point.

The point is this — life is too long to spend it doing anything less than what you want.

I don’t know why you’re here.

All I know is I came here for the wrong reasons, and I’ll be damned if I stay for the same.

Maybe if we all stopped conforming and started living like these actually were our lives to begin with, we might see some real change in this world.

­— cgerst@indiana.edu
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Cameron Gerst on Twitter
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