The U.S. is a country of productivity. Your character is judged solely on how productive you are in your field. The more you work, the better you are as a person or the more useful you are. The more you are able to keep pushing forward, even to the detriment of your health, is a direct reflection of how much you care.

This sentiment is so widespread that openly hating your career — or rather only being in a career because of the paycheck — is normalized. Money over happiness is encouraged, even. Before teenagers go to college, society drills a singular idea into the youth: go into a practical field. One where you make money and have stability.

Engineering, law, analytics, tech and medical fields have become the catch-all for this mindset, and are praised for being miserable but “worth it” because you are well compensated. Admittedly, these careers do create vital and useful members of society. However, these important fields are commonly validated by devaluing the humanities as being useless and a waste of time.

But what qualifies as being useful? Who gets to decide what is critical and what isn’t?

In a capitalistic society, being useful is be seen as going to a good school to pursue a degree in a STEM based or otherwise financially lucrative career, getting a good job in a high-paying field, aggressively climbing the ladder, and creating a family that allows you to then continue this cycle — and anything that deviates isn’t useful and should be abandoned.

This mindset is, unsurprisingly, harmful. When we primarily place value on STEM fields, fields that allow you to hoard wealth, we don’t credit how important the liberal arts are to the human soul.

We should be teaching that no matter what field you go into, you will be supported. That there is value in writing, painting, speech and philosophy. We should be encouraging young people to pursue careers that interest them, to defy our conditioning.

And yes, the job you want may not be the most respected should you pursue liberal arts, but change has to start somewhere. We must deconstruct the idea that only a degree that makes you lots of money is fulfilling. I understand having financial resources is important, but truthfully, money can’t buy you happiness.

The narrative that liberal arts degrees are useless is false. Liberal arts degrees can help you in many other fields as well. Due to what is taught, individuals are much more likely to encounter more conceptual, theoretical or philosophical issues in their studies than others who may have studied accounting or engineering, which deal in cold, hard facts, spreadsheets and numbers.

Which is a blessing. Yes, we need mathematicians and inventors, but we also need philosophers who can discuss the depth of the human experience, then formulate the hidden truths they find into universal ideas.

Obviously, I am not advocating for everyone to now drop everything and get a liberal arts degree because they are “better.” I am advocating for both traditional and liberal arts degrees to receive the same value and importance. They are both necessary in different ways. You need ethics just as much as you need business classes; both can help you run a successful company, but ethics keeps it human.

There are no “wrong” careers or bad fields of study. What you choose to do with the knowledge you get does matter. Getting a job that makes you a lot of money doesn’t matter if you don’t like what you do. What you choose to do with what you have is the real determining factor of your life. There is value in both STEM and in the liberal arts.

Michaiah Stephens is a 22-year-old english major from Durham, N.C.