wanting to vs "having" to - how to choose between them?

[WhyTry]

I’ve never really given as much thought to the whole point of life as I have in the past few months. College has been an interesting experience. It’s given me the chance to see life from a very different perspective. In this time, I’ve gone through several phases. I’ll start with where I came from.

 

Before I got here, I had a very well defined outlook on life. I viewed it in terms of concrete and measurable accomplishments. This is what I used to gauge life by. I gauged my personal satisfaction by what I accomplished relative to other people, and I was happy with this.

 

When I got to college, I met more people, and I began to feel threatened because I saw more people who had accomplished more than I did. After some depressive episodes, I realized that happiness can’t be judged merely by accomplishments for many reasons. I won’t bother stating them here, as there are many and they’re not really the point.

 

However, having abandoned that method of evaluating life to keep on track, I’ve sort of drifted into a weird constant feeling that can best be described as an apathetic lack of interest. I find it hard to build up the motivation to do anything that isn’t immediately gratifying as I have a drastically different view on life now. In the past, I was less reluctant to sacrifice my time for a concrete accomplishment as this was what I was aiming for. However, I can no longer justify that decision as I have no more goal that gives me the drive to do this. I no longer care about what I accomplish as I now view life as a rather precious gift that we shouldn’t waste by accomplishing goals that aren’t intrinsically satisfying.

 

The real problem with satisfaction is that what I viewed as satisfaction in the past dealt with accomplishment based goals, not intrinsically rewarding goals. What I do now deals with me pleasing myself with no other purpose. I don't get satisfaction from any accomplishment based goals, as I don't have anything that satisfy both criteria. On top of all this, everyone basically perceives what I do as a joke - that I don't care enough about focusing on my future in the sense they believe people should focus on it.

 

 

I guess my real dilemma is that what I view as fun wouldn’t provide for a very financially secure life which I would like. To attain this security, I would have to make a sacrifice between what I want to do and what I “have” to do. I Guess my real question for you guys is, how have you guys dealt with the choice between what you wanted to do and what you felt as being pressured to do by a sort of external influence (this relates to careers, majors, or anything else).

[Sn0man]

Everyone deals with this. What we 'want' to do VS what we 'have' to do VS what were 'Expected' to do.

 

Despitge what youy say - life is in fact measured by accomplishments to people like you and me. When you accomplish a goal, you feel like you've made progress, and have done something 'right'. You are also most likely rewarded for your accomplishment.

 

When you fail, you, like me, feel a sense of overwhelming failure and generally feel like you have 'let down' all those people who weree looking up to you.

 

This is not true. Failure, as brutal as it is, is central to success. And it is seen as an accomplishment, believe it or not - "so and so has had his/her first failure and will learn so mcuh from this". ....

 

This so called external influence is in your head - the real influence is in your own judgements and decisions.

 

I could go on forever with this - but I'll stop. I do have personal experience with this situation though so feel free to PM me.

[WhyTry]

I agree - accomplishing something feels great. The work in itself isn't the problem as long as I have a justifiable goal. I guess I'm having troubles forming a goal because I've had a recent change of heart regarding what I was planning to major on. As a result, I don't really see anything that interests me, so I've sort of gotten to the point of deciding whether or not I'm going to shoot for something that provides financial stability. Is this a bad way of picking a future? My true interests are things that probably wouldn't provide a very financially stable life, and I'm not sure how that would work out with me. Sure, I'd love doing it, but is it realistic that we always do what we love?