Follow your heart, and you will not get lost. Do what you love, and the money will follow. Leap, and the net will appear. Find your passion, and run with it. Lies. All lies, I say. Well-meant but stupid fairy tales told by generations over and over – to young adults like us, the one group of people who most deserve the truth.

College is not the time to find your passion, nor can it be. It is the four years we have to apparently decide our specialty for the other three-fourths of our lives. So, what if most people get jobs unrelated to their major? If that is the case, then a college degree is worth no more than that sheet of paper bought with tens of thousands of abused dollars. An unused degree is a useless degree and, frankly, a criminal waste of effort put into a major you thought would be relevant or at least worth your time.

Tacky advice applies to few people, people so extraordinary that we make up motivational sayings for those with little chance of following in their footsteps. Achieved dreams are only delusions gone right, and those who get there encourage theirs fans’ delusions without announcing how close they were to likely failure.

I blame my cynicism on being advised as if my passion would be obvious. I blame my unhappiness on this idea I cannot get out of my head – that we should never settle for anything less than our passion and that we should never stop searching until we have found our passion. We are extremely young adults; I do not see how it is even remotely possible to find our passion without having tried everything.

We are asked to make a decision we do not have enough experience to make, and it is enraging that I only realized this years after I needed to. It is not fair that I had to major in biology in order to realize what I should have done, and it is pathetic that I am disappointed with a good major because I do not know what could have been.

I am no more qualified to give advice than those who wronged me with theirs. Rather, I serve as an example of everything that can go wrong. I carry the damage brought by either a void of passion or an insatiable desire for something which I do not know even exists. If anything, my passion lies in my lack of it.

I know the value of an education, and I have a good idea of what it will bring me in the future. I still have plans – I just did not need to follow my heart to make them. I condemn the idea that passion is the only legitimate source of motivation. It may be relevant, but it certainly is not necessary. It does not make college any more or less easier, just more or less confusing.

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Cheyenne Paiva is a sophomore majoring in biology. Her column runs biweekly on Mondays.