I sit in a dorm room writing this article as a first year engineering student, and, truth be told, my life is a mess of complications and work. Assignments, classes, a part time job, and even Odyssey. My schedule is erratic to a degree where I struggle to determine where it is I need to be at any given point in my week. My life is not enjoyable the majority of the time. This is not merely me pitching a fit though, this is how most Americans, indeed a great number of people around the world, live their lives everyday.

Our lives matter insofar as we are, to date, the only intelligent life of which we are aware. Beyond the survival of our race, and its progress towards a better, happier future, nothing else matters. It won’t matter to a universe too vast for me to comprehend that I didn’t turn in my Mech 100 assignment on time, or that Cheryl from Whitebread, Illinois who works at CookieCutter Industries failed to adequately collate a stack of papers. It is of no consequence whether or not I make enough to buy a $60,000 car, only that I am happy.

We, or at least I, have been raised to believe that is not the case. I have been brought up with the notion that you must always do your best and try your hardest even at the expense of your happiness, sanity, and sometimes even your health. I’m not saying I had bad parents; they were wonderful, and they by no means want me sad, insane, and dead, but I was always told that work came before pleasure. I believe it’s time that we challenge that notion.

“Life should be simple. Everything that we do should be in the express interest of either survival, or happiness” -NoOneYouLearnedAboutInSchool. There are benefits to overachieving, but the definition between overachieving and keeping on par continually moves up in American society and most overachieving adolescents work more hours every day between school, and homework (not to mention extracurriculars and chores and part time jobs) than their parents do working 40 hours a week. And most parents of high achieving students, it must be said, are likely working more than a 40 hour week themselves, because in the U.S. work seems to be the normal way of life.

What if we stood up to it, though? What if, instead of working as an engineer for a company that manufactures cheap dollar store chapstick, you worked as a gardener and enjoyed the beautiful sight of a well kept landscape everyday? What if, instead of taking on hours of overtime everyday for weeks to save up for a vacation that is going to cause more stress in travel than it’s worth, we just came home after a shorter workday and read a good book all night?

I wish I had more time to read. I wish I had more time to write. I wish that I could write for a living so that I wouldn’t have to go through the tedious education (much of it irrelevant) to become an engineer. Why do I do this to myself? Well, it’s because I want to go on nice trips, and I want to own nice cars, and I want to live in a nice apartment in the city. I’m just worried that when I get there the economics won’t have made sense. I’m worried that when I acquire those options in life that I will have spent years overcomplicating things to the point of misery and that it won’t have been worth it.

But wait! Nick, what if I don’t hate my life everyday? Well fellow citizen of Earth, I’ll ask you this: how many times this week did your alarm clock sound, and you woke up with a smile? What? Zero? Read a book.