There is a world out there. Bettering it is important, but the worn roads lead to nowhere. Most people follow them, and never consider doing anything else. If you ask them when they chose to do nothing, and they answer truthfully, most will say they never chose—they merely did what was expected of them.
You, however, have open eyes. You believe that studying and teaching math will make you happy, but studying other things will, with some small probability, position you to aid the world. All the philosophy of utility functions can do is wrap this choice up in more boilerplate; it can’t help you make it. What can help is information about how happy you’ll be, given each choice, and about how much you can actually help the world, given each choice.
I suspect that whether you study and teach math will affect your happiness much less than you think. It’s also nearly certain that there are other good options you haven’t considered. It depends a lot on details—what other aptitudes you have, and whether the school you’ll be going to will help you study things other than math, in particular. And you haven’t really explained what not-studying-math would mean; it would be easier to compare if that were replaced with something more concrete, like taking a gap year to study independently.
There is a world out there. Bettering it is important, but the worn roads lead to nowhere. Most people follow them, and never consider doing anything else. If you ask them when they chose to do nothing, and they answer truthfully, most will say they never chose—they merely did what was expected of them.
You, however, have open eyes. You believe that studying and teaching math will make you happy, but studying other things will, with some small probability, position you to aid the world. All the philosophy of utility functions can do is wrap this choice up in more boilerplate; it can’t help you make it. What can help is information about how happy you’ll be, given each choice, and about how much you can actually help the world, given each choice.
I suspect that whether you study and teach math will affect your happiness much less than you think. It’s also nearly certain that there are other good options you haven’t considered. It depends a lot on details—what other aptitudes you have, and whether the school you’ll be going to will help you study things other than math, in particular. And you haven’t really explained what not-studying-math would mean; it would be easier to compare if that were replaced with something more concrete, like taking a gap year to study independently.