Whaaa Econ test today

Well today I had my Stats and Probability test. I don't think I did as well as I should have, but then again, times like this are bound to happen. I often wonder after taking a test, regardless of whether I felt I had done poorly or well, what the purpose is behind what I'm doing, why I'm learning. Is it that I wish to have the greatest amount of success possible by assimilating as much useful information and skills as I can in the limited amount I have until I am expected to produce on my own? Why is this my goal? Why do I struggle further with this aim in mind?

I've told my peers my perspective on life many times before: "We are born, live, and then die." Really that's all there is to it. And yet, so many of them tend to regard this as a bad thing. When most people hear that, they immediately think that I believe there is no purpose in life and therefore I do not strive for anything. I would contend that it means the exact opposite. It is precisely because our lives are finite, that there is a definite end (in math terminology, I guess one would say that for all lives, there exists a death that is unique to that life), that we should strive for our goals. But it also means that we have to realize and prioritize that which is truly important. Which is more important: Understanding that the expectation of a certain event is closed under multiplication and addition, or understanding how and why my friends reacts when she does poorly on an exam? I claim that the latter is not only far more important, but holds far more depth. Then why is it that we study academics, these bland facts that have no more depth than the paper they are written upon? This is because we have desires. In the case of academics, we wish for success in the "real" world, thus we rely upon doing well in these well-accepted academics in order to gain passage (ie a job) into the real world.

Now, I as much as anyone wish to do well in the real world. I wish to have success, at least in a marginal sense, I wish to lead a happy life, and I wish to be able to die knowing that I did everything I wished to do. In the end that's all we can really ask for. We are born, we live, and then we die. However, obsessing over success, obsessing over knowledge gained, obsessing over happiness, these things are meaningless. I hear many people say that they live in order to maximize their success, their knowledge, or their happiness. That's the purpose they have in life. But too often, when we focus on one thing as our entire goal, we lose focus of everything else in life, whether it be our family, our friends, those around us, the world around us, the sounds, the sights, the smells, and everything about our existence that we take for granted. We are born, we live, and then we die. To that end, I believe that we should simply exist and experience as much as we can. We don't have to give our all for success, knowledge, or happiness. We should simply be, and do.