If you need to crowdsource this decision do not go to college immediately.
College is expensive as fuck, and it is wasted on someone who doesn’t have a burning desire to be there for a specific course of study.
Instead, go live the life of a person without a degree. Just be a human for a while, and learn how to the world works. Then go to college.
If you go to college without a clear mission, you’re going to be twiddling your thumbs in a place that costs more than continuous international travel. Like, go travel internationally if you want a mind-expanding experience of self discovery. That will help you pick a major.
I say this as someone who went to college “as my destiny”. I went to college because it was always assumed I would go. I wasted time, money, energy, and opportunity by doing so.
College used to be a place to find yourself. Then it started costing five figures per year, and it became a place you go to get what you need to make more money. That’s what it still is, and will continue to be until it becomes inexpensive again.
Traveling the world, staying in hostels, learning bits of languages, meeting other travelers and locals, getting a little month to month apartment and waiting tables in a foreign city, partying with the locals, getting involved in whatever they’re doing, this is cheaper than college, and far more valuable, if you’re at a place where you don’t know which degree you want.
I know it takes a lot of courage to buck the trend and do what all the (foolish) grey-haired people in your life are doing.
But trust me. College is a different thing than it used to be, specifically because it got super fucking expensive.
College stopped being casual, and started being a very serious thing, and in that way it changed fundamentally from a place of exploration into a place of industry. It is not a place to fuck around. I mean, it is, but not wisely. There are far cheaper, far better places to explore yourself and the world.
I haven’t starved yet. I know from experience that if I get calorically restricted for too long, I will do anything to fill my stomach. So fortunately, it hasn’t got to the point where my morality starts to degrade yet.
Then maybe our source of money should be that production, and not the personal wealth of billionaires?
Like, if you make a car that runs on diesel, and there’s a gallon of diesel in the world, you’ve made a car with 1 gallon of fuel.
If you make UBI that runs on the contents of billionaires’ bank accounts, and there’s three months’ worth of money in those bank accounts, you’ve made UBI that works for three months.
There is also a reasonable assumption that taking away people’s money would result in a decreased expected value from future money, leading to a decrease in the motivation to produce that we currently enjoy.
Let’s say a person goes from having nothing to having $1M in the bank. How does a person do that? Well, in a free market they do that by providing $1M worth of value to other people.
Should that person, who we know is capable of providing serious value, go on to try to have two million? It would be good for our society if they did, so we’d better hope they do.
But if our history includes a day when all the billionaires had everything taken from them, this means that they now have to ask themselves if there’s any danger of going over the threshold, become “evil” in the eye of society, and stripped of their rights.
Suddenly being rich is quite dangerous. It alters the incentives. Assuming a very straightforward connection between potential reward and motivation, it could be very bad for the economy to liquidate the richest people’s accounts.
The inflation isn’t “fake” and it’s not a result of greed. The greed has always been there, during periods of hyperinflation and during periods of stability.
The thing that changed is the competition, which naturally counterbalances the greed, has been reduced during the pandemic.