Success or Happiness?

As an undergraduate, I decided to get a Bachelor of Arts degree instead of a Bachelor of Science degree for practical reasons--science and math, while not impossible for me to grasp, require a lot more effort than humanities-based classes.

My dad, meanwhile, frequently lamented my choice of major. Who on earth would employ a girl with an English degree? (A creative writing degree, no less) What would I do with my life?

Anyway, a B.A. requires four semesters of a foreign language. Spanish seemed a logical choice--it seemed like a good chunk of the student population, not to mention the U.S. population--spoke it. And so I found myself in classes with a fellow creative writing student. Since we already knew each other, we always sat next to each other. We took notes for each other. And we got to be quite chummy.

He wasn't the sort of person who looked like an aspiring poet; he was the sort of person who looked like a personal trainer. He regularly went to the gym, and he ran or lifted weights to help him think his way through any given problem or poem.

He was the sort of person many people would expect to hear swearing like a sailor, but he'd quote Neal A. Maxwell. In addition, he looked menacing and intense. And that assessment was half right--he was very intense. And passionate. Once he believed in something or someone, it took a lot to sway him.

Like me, he didn't always think before he reacted. But he was always quick to apologize if he thought he'd offended. Unless he didn't like people. Then he sort of reveled in it when they took offense. But not to their faces, at least.

Anyway, many people mistook him as a stereotypical bad boy. It was an easy mistake to make if you only scratched his surface. In our fourth semester Spanish class, a shallow little soccer player took a shining to him. I spent quite a lot of time watching her (fruitlessly) attempt to flirt with him. You could tell she had a bad-boy complex.

He dodged it quite well by always including me in the conversation. Or by dropping any conversation with her and taking up one with me whenever I came in. (It was gratifying, really; we were good friends and it was nice to be able to talk a variety of philosophies and argue about the merits of different styles of poetry as well as discussing a variety of other things. It gave me faith that all men didn't entirely devote their attention to bimbos)

One day, however, I ended up being interjected into a conversation she had started with him, because she had decided to major in business. She had faith she could figure out a way of climbing the corporate ladder and making boatloads of money, and she thought it a good strategy. (When I wished her good luck in shattering the glass ceiling, she said "Huh?" And I chuckled.)

When she asked about our majors, we told her we were both majoring in poetry. She mentioned that it didn't seem like a terribly lucrative major. And both of us had the same response--we would much rather be poor and happy, we told her, than be insanely rich and miserable.

I told her the Beatles had pegged it--money can't buy you love. It also can't buy you happiness. Or satisfaction. Or good friendships.

From that point to the end of semester, she spent the beginning of every class attempting to convince us to go into majors that would pay us more. Until at one point, my friend told her, "I think the only reason I would ever climb the corporate ladder is so I can jump off it and kill myself."

I remembered that this morning when one of my co-workers asked if I was returning to school. "In a sense," I told him. "I'm going back to get my master's."

"In business administration?"

"No, in English."

"MBA's get paid quite a lot. You could buy a number of things with an MBA."

"Except contentment."

It's interesting to note how many people here in the office think of their jobs only in terms of salary. They don't seem to think it matters whether they love or loathe their positions; as long as it pays them enough, they believe they will be happy. Misery for eight hours a day, they seem to think, is worth the price of being able to maintain their standard of living.

And sometimes I wonder--if they ever quit and got jobs that caused happiness for eight hours a day and didn't help their standard of living, would they have a worse time of it? Or a better one?