“I just got done with it!” my friend declares, holding up a copy of the "Outlander" novel. “I just wasted all of my free time for the week, too!”

“Why?” I ask her.

“Because, you know, I could have spent it reading something more meaningful,” she replies.

"Why do you say that?"

“'Outlander' is a great book, but it has nothing to do with my major. I feel depressed thinking of all the reading and assignments I would've done for class if I hadn't read it.”

As we grow older, life presents us with a chance to expand our knowledge of the world. Learning institutions are one of the key places for this. Listening to my friend makes me think, however, about whether there is a pressure presented with the experience that comes from these learning institutions -- especially college.

Want a horror story in real life? Ask a college student about the volumes of books she has to read for classes. “You pay so much for them that you wish they’d come with chips to insert in your brain so you can retrieve the information they contain when you need it,” is a statement of one college student that is echoed by most of us. And you have to read through each of those assigned pages because you have to have a point-of-view during class about the case presented on page 42 of the assigned book.

Coupled with this feeling of wanting to always be on top of our class reading comes the fact that each one of us wants to be an expert on something -- if not everything -- and that the subject we settle on has to have content and needs to make perfect sense. So, once we settle on what careers we want to pursue, we have that need to know everything about it. We want to know about its history, what it is in the present and predict what will happen to it in the future. We have to have direction in life because that is how the human brain is wired to think; that is what the society we are brought up in raises us to believe.

So there is a pressure to “stick to the stuff we know,” and while we are at it, to surround ourselves with knowledge that only expands the stuff we know. Because otherwise, it is irrelevant. We give up our "reading for the sake of it" for this, because we are taught to believe that nothing profound comes of leisure reading. We teach ourselves that reading that requires us to really lean in -- with our time, sweat and money -- is the good reading. That is the reading that will result in something that you will be proud of. It makes us guilty every time we pick a random read from the shelf at the library. It makes us especially guilty if we enjoy reading that random book.

Is this how it should be? Should we channel all our energy to reading only the books that our life and career choices dictate us to feel that only relevant books matter?