Why are we here?

A little over a year and a half ago, I asked myself "Why are we here?" in a blog post about learning. That was a pretty general post that came from Relay for Life, but now I'm here to talk about school. (Editor's Note: I'm not sure what it is about this semester, but I'm afraid that I'm starting to not like school, and as a result, not like Stonehill. I really hope I'm wrong with the latter.) Why are we in school? Why are we in college, graduate school, whatever it is? To get a job? Because that's the logical next step? Because someone may be paying for us to be in school? Why can't we just be here to learn? One question I've been getting asked is what I want to do with my life as a Math/Psych double-major. I love the look on people's faces when I tell them I want to work in sports, because you wouldn't really figure that to be the number one choice for either of those fields of study. Grad school sounds much more viable. But you know what? I like psychology to the point where I want to take enough classes in it to say that I am an expert at it. I truly enjoy learning about psychology and the practical nature of the subject matter. And it's been in my psychology classes where I've learned that we need to ask ourselves more than just why we're here. We need to ask ourselves why we're here, and what we're really learning. One reason for attending college, that we talked about in the IDEAS seminar last spring, was that people develop themselves as individuals. And it's a question that I'm struggling with right now, because I'm wondering if we actually need college to do this. Why can't we develop ourselves on our own time, without dropping $200,000 over four years? In my Sport Psych class today, our last class of the semester, we talked about changes we would make, and most of the students (myself included) talked about how relating class material to our own lives, our own experiences as athletes made the class more enjoyable, and helped us to understand sport psychology better. Better than any textbook spitting out information could. Because I can go to Google for any old information, but I can't go to Google for how I'm thinking and feeling about something. And those thoughts and feelings are what drive us, as much value as people may place on information. I believe that there's so much more value in understanding ourselves, and I know that I always go back to this post, but that's because learning about ourselves is one of the best things we can do. So please, ask yourself not only why we're here, but what we're doing here and what we're going to get out of it. Because if you think that we're just here to learn information, there's more to it. And if you think that we're just here to learn about ourselves, there's more to it. It's the interaction of the two, how we understand the interaction of those two, and how we understand ourselves in terms of those two, that makes being here worth it.

If you have the time, check out this song. It's called "Communal Blood" by This Will Destroy You. It's really good for writing a single, long paragraph blog post about something you feel strongly about.