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[seidoo_ryuu]

I have the Quote of the Day RSS feed on my flist. A lot of times I get repeats, but every now and then, they post a good one:

"I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."

--James Thurber

Comments

[laridian.livejournal.com]

I had a friend back in the just-after-college days who said she was changing her major from (whatever) to psychology. Her reason? "To find out what makes people tick."

Aside from that being a terrible reason to change your major (pick something that can give you a career, for crying out loud), that's a terrible reason, period. As I told her, all human behavior can be summed up as, "People are one of four things: Good, Bad, Crazy or Stupid." And that really does seem to sum up most human behavior, doesn't it?

[seidoo-ryuu.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I agree with you on the 'pick a major that has a chance of leading to a career' issue. I had friends who were majoring in fields with no specific goal in mind, just because it was "interesting", and/or for similar reasons as your friend. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is well and good, but make sure you can pay the bills, first.

(and really, why do you need a fancy, expensive degree in order to be able to figure that out? You want an ad hoc lesson in human psychology, go sit in the mall on any given Saturday afternoon and just observe. You learn more by people-watching than you'll ever learn with your nose buried in a book, I think.)

And I agree with you: People really do fall into one of those four categories, and sometimes, more than one. ;) I've also noticed that a lot of people really don't want to accept that it's that simple, and are convinced there's more to it than that, if that makes sense. ^^