When cramming for an exam, sitting in a boring lecture, or weeping silently at my keyboard as words fail to form on my computer screen, I occasionally have a particular thought: why am I doing this? What is the ultimate reward for my struggles, my boredom and my frustrations? Is this major the one for me? Is college even a worthwhile endeavor?

Everyone I’ve talked to goes through this. I hear people talk about it, but usually the alternatives suggested are simply other majors that offer jobs they’re somewhat familiar with. I think people should step back a little further, and reevaluate their life plans a little more.

I remember seeing a chart in high school that compared average salaries with education levels. It was on an easily interpreted bar graph, and the x-axis ranged from “high school dropout” to “PhD.” The bars jumped up a lot, by tens of thousands of dollars, on each improvement in education. This is what I was taught, and what I would have figured intuitively anyway if I had not seen the chart. It makes sense, right? More education equals more money. But why money?

I think the reason money is always pointed to as a motivator is because it’s something basic that everyone shares. Not everyone cares much about spiritual fulfillment, or even has the same idea of what that means, so a bar chart on that would be hard to draw up.

But everyone knows what material things are, and how more money translates to better versions of those things. Since most of us lack the ability to visualize a better life without better “stuff,” it’s easy to make money the goal of our lives. We have the ability to reduce just about anything to dollars: time, education and life. All of this is in theory, on paper, on high school motivational posters.

In reality, money seems to have little to do with happiness in the long run. For example: a friend of mine graduated with a chemical engineering degree, landed a sweet job at a major Fortune 500 company making right at six figures just out of college. This is a huge jump from minimum wage jobs and credit card debt. I was positively thrilled to hear about his story–I was in engineering at the time and his is the type of experience that most engineering students hope (and secretly think) will happen to them.

When I actually got to talk to him a few months later, I was surprised to find that he wasn’t really living a better life at all. He was driving a better car, lived in a nicer apartment, and yet still had the same hobbies and interests he always had. His lifestyle had inflated along with his income, and he wasn’t any happier or different than he was in college. I figured he would at least be taking more vacations or have an easier schedule.

In fact, he was working 50-hour weeks and was lucky to get a weekend off. Don’t get me wrong; he was pleased with how things were going. However, he wasn’t the picture of jolly, carefree wealth I had envisioned.

Later, I heard about the “hedonic treadmill,” which describes exactly what I witnessed with my engineering friend. In general, individual human happiness remains stable, despite changes in the individual’s economic position. You see depressed rich kids as often as poor kids, and lottery winners don’t stay elated for long, or depressed for long after losing it all. If you’re a happy kind of person, that’s what you’re going to be for the majority of your life. It’s internal.

This isn’t intended to be a fluffy “reach for the stars” kind of motivational piece. This is really for those of you out there who feel stuck on a path you don’t care about, in the hope that money will make it worthwhile in the end. All of the evidence suggests the contrary. Apparently money isn’t a very good reason to go to college these days anyway. Every other week there’s a new story about how college is a bad investment, that odds are you’ll lose money by getting a degree, and how degrees “aren’t as good as they used to be.” In light of this, why would you major in anything besides what you are very interested in? I say, go for broke, find a passion, and pursue the hell out of it.