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One question in college that changed everything

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“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” —Albert Camus •

Things seemed to be going extremely well for me until I started college. Just like in school during the years before college, I relied on my parents to help me define my path so I could know exactly what I had to do to succeed. When it came time to pick my major, I really had no clue what to focus on. I had lots of different interests at the time, but no clear direction to follow, so I asked my parents what I should do. Since I enjoyed designing in Photoshop and creating websites, my parents suggested I go into the computer engineering field. I thought that made sense, so I took their lead and signed up for physics and math my first semester there.

I knew things were going to suck from the very first day of classes. I had set my alarm clock to a radio station, thinking that would be the perfect thing to wake up to in the morning. The very next day at 8:00 AM, I heard a Backstreet Boys song start to play as I woke up, sang along in my head, and then drifted back to sleep. When I woke up again, it was already 10:30 AM, and not only had I missed my physics class, I was already halfway into my math class. I rushed out of my room and ran to class, thinking to myself, I can’t screw up this early on, I just can’t. Waking up late that morning ended up being the least of my problems, however; as I dove deeper into learning physics and math, I realized I just couldn’t keep up. The topics and material we were covering were not only too hard for me, I felt so disconnected from the class that I just felt sick to my stomach about going. Was computer engineering the right major for me? Had I made the right decision here?

I had never been steered wrong before when I followed my parents’ lead, so why did this all feel so wrong to me? By the end of the first semester, I was placed on academic probation for getting below a 2.0 GPA. I received an F in my physics class and got a D in my math class, which left me wondering if college was right for me. Deep down, I wanted to be there, but I knew something had to change. I felt depressed, I felt worthless, and worst of all, I felt like I was disappointing my parents. So early one morning, when my roommate had left for the weekend, I woke up early on a Saturday, opened the shades to the room to let in the sunlight, and then asked myself the most complex question I’d ever asked: why should I go on living, and what is my purpose for being alive?

I told myself that if I couldn’t find an answer by the end of the day, then I would simply end it. I couldn’t imagine a life without a purpose.

I sat there for hours, thinking and thinking about what I could do and what my purpose was, and it wasn’t until later in that evening that the answer finally hit me. My purpose in life is to experience it, and the reason I should go on living is to share it with others. I felt like the answer was so incredibly simple, yet it was something I had never thought about before. For my second semester of college, I knew I had to break from my current path. I needed to define for myself what success would look like, and I needed to do it for one person: me. I changed my college major to “undecided” and enrolled in philosophy classes to start from the ground up on recognizing how I could create a path for my new purpose.

That wasn’t the only thing that changed for me, though; as time went on, I suddenly became more open to the world around me. I started to notice the squirrels running by on the grass, the way the sun set over the buildings on campus, and how each and every person was someone just like me, trying to find a way to be somebody great. I felt connected with everyone and everything, and I knew at that point more than ever that I didn’t have to make my life revolve around someone else’s approval, I just had to live it for me.