Because literature's fascinating? I gave up an English major for something more tech-related, because I read and analyze on my own - I don't need college for that - but still, if I had a choice between a billion dollars and acute understanding of every line of Finnegans Wake, I'd take the latter.
Yes, that's a good reason to get a literature major. But if you paid in blood to go to a top-tier school that doesn't seem all that much better at teaching literature than a lot of other reasonably good schools, and are paying huge sums to do it, and expect excellent job prospects, then you may be making a mistake. Sounds like this isn't your case. But I get the impression this is pretty common.
What shocks me is meeting people who seem intensely focused on the rat race and appear to want to take on the world, but then get into Yale or whatever and decide to study something that is not exactly conductive to world domination. Then they complain. This...makes my brain hurt. I totally respect your choice regarding Finnegans Wake and the billion dollars. But surely the philistine who preferred the billion would not be better off with the English major. And surely he has no right to be surprised when he has trouble getting jobs as good as those of his engineering peers.
I guess I'm lucky - I absolutely, completely, totally get off on business. I reckon business is defined as "problem solving to create value, and get some of the value you created". I was always into problem solving, Chess, figuring out at age 4 how to push a chair from the dining room into the kitchen to get the Teddy Grahams cookies my parents hid in the top cupboard from me, etc. Learning formal business skills should be about then learning how to refine your problem solving skills, and how to get some of the value you created in the way of money or whatever else suits you.
I don't dig on standard MBA-style fancy-lexicon-of-big-words-business despite undergraduate work in business/project management, and all the wealthiest people I know are dropouts or never attended. But for me, the making money thing is about problem solving, and then getting some of the value you created (which is just another, specific kind of problem solving). Means I can do love and money at the same time.
I'm not one for over-the-top problem solving. I can when I want to, but my natural inclination is to only solve the problems that I feel really matter, and to leave the rest to other people. My primary aims are ending paradigms, I guess. I like shattering the way other people think, having people see things in new lights. I like the same reaction in me. And that's something that art and art alone can do. I'm not mystical about it: I just care about that idea of the artistic statement, sort of a declaration of intent. So that's what I focus on.
Beyond that, however, Finnegans Wake is just the most incredible piece of art I've ever seen. If you like solving puzzles, that's a book for you. It's the hardest book on the planet, and it's beautiful. A single sentence in that book blows away most literature I've read, period. Understanding it in its entirety is near-impossible. That's why I'd take that over the billion dollars.
(Mind you, I'd take a billion dollars over most other things. I like earning money a lot.)
Very cool stuff unalone, you're consistently one of my favorite commentators here. I'd toss out there that science and philosophy also shatter paradigms, but I'm with you on art. From your description of Finnegans Wake, I'll add it to my things to read list - thanks.
I think that the proper route is to learn both science and art. I don't know that much about various individual fields of science, though I'd really like to, but I know that there's definitely an art to the way math works, and I'm sure it extends to other stuff too.
Oh, and a severe note of warning: Finnegans Wake is extraordinarily tough to read. It's online, so you might want to take a look at it before you go out of your way to read it.
