Money has become the common and overarching goal in our society, causing personality to be extracted from the person. Money has such a blurring effect for the vision of humanity, evident by the mindset that puts money as the most important thing to gain. I know this because at times, money haunts me. The fury that builds within me when I lose money, whether that be by misplacing it or spending too much, stirs around my brain like a boiling pot of tar, bubbling and allowing smoke to roll out of my ears. And as my anger amplifies, I ask myself a question: Why do I let pieces of paper make me this mad?

I’ve seen countless incidents where monetary conflicts have been overblown. I’ve been in legitimate fights with some of my good friends over petty bills and coins. But does money really deserve all this aggressive attention? The hands of our society try to grasp capital with such force that their own fingers stab themselves. Sometimes I feel that when one’s relationship with money becomes more serious, all other relationships seem to fall to the wayside. I would love to be successful and have a lot of money, but I don’t think that is all that there is to life.

I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up but if I had to make the choice right now, I would rap and make beats. If our education system and the overarching pursuit of monetary success wasn’t so embedded in our society, I probably would have rapped out of high school and seen where life took me. But there is no way my parents would have allowed me to do that and in reality, I think I would have been too scared to follow my dreams. However, I knew I liked to write and I felt that journalism is the most professional side of writing. So here I am, sort of following my dreams, choosing money over what I really want. Even so, my dad was mad at me for even going into journalism, Medill graduates usually “only” make $36,394 per year. I understood his distress because I knew some of my fellow alumni would be making much closer to six figures or more. At this point I had to ask myself if I was going to follow the green paper trail or the trail of my sort of dreams.

I never really liked green, not on paper at least, and I’m beginning to become sickened by the idea of money. Really, money isn’t as important as everyone makes it out to be. If all I had in my life was a pen, paper, musical instruments and good friends, I think I would be content. The allotment of money definitely may seem like the foundation of happiness, but I don’t think this is always true. I’m not bashing successful people, because there are countless millionaires I have great respect for, but I just don’t think money should be seen as necessary, as it blinds us to other possibilities of genuine happiness. I often imagine the complete failure of my professional life and ending up on the street, but I’m not scared by it. I only think of all the time I could be working on my real passion and following my dreams instead of doing something I’m not passionate about.

Pedro Acosta is a Medill freshman. He can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].