Episode Notes Form: https://forms.gle/XY41oQSrGpBBxEXD8 [“Don’t Tell Me Your Major Theme” By Malena Ramnath] Malena: Hey guys! My name is Malena Ramnath. Hannah: I'm Hannah Fredly. M: And we are your hosts and sophomores here at Northwestern. This is Don't Tell Me Your Major, an interview podcast where we avoid getting to know people on the surface level with questions like what their major is, where they're from, and how old they are, but try to get to know them on a more profound level. That's how you really get to know the kind of person someone is rather than judging them based on pre-established stereotypes. So today, it's just the two of us because last episode, we had a guest. So today, it's just us, the hosts, me and Hannah. And today, we really wanted to talk about the idea of imagination, because it's COVID still. We're still stuck inside. It's a panda-nemic. And I think our imagination can oftentimes be our only escape from this kind of stuff. Right? So, my first question for us to answer here on our podcast today is did you ever have any imaginary friends when you were little Hannah? H: So this is gonna be a really boring answer, but I did not actually. I knew a lot of people who did and I have some funny stories, but I myself never had one. M: Okay, at least give me a funny story about it. H: So I had a friend back home, who used to have an imaginary friend. And so when she was little, she was walking down the street and she used to talk to her imaginary friend. And so she would tell me that people low key thought she was crazy sometimes because she would like, talk into thin air. M: Oh my gosh, like I couldn't do that. I couldn't just talk into thin air. That being said, though, I definitely imagine that my stuffed animals and teddy bears have personalities. I still kind of do. I think it's a remnant from Toy Story being a thing. I definitely, you know, had my teddy bears and they have personalities. You know, my boyfriend isn't necessarily so happy about the fact that I'm still a five-year-old inside, but that was – they were like my imaginary friends. You know? Also because my parents never really bought me – maybe it's like a gender stereotype thing, but also, I didn't mind it – they just never, I never even really had Barbies, or like, Legos or anything. I just had a million teddy bears. So yeah, I guess it was safer, child-safety-wise, to just surround me with soft, plush things. H: Yeah, actually, you want to know something funny? So back home, in Norway, I used to have like a, like a fat big drawer only full of teddy bears. And there were some teddy bears that was like, they were too big to fit in the drawer and be like huge giraffes, like the size of my body, my little child body, like big bears, like the size. And if I put them all on my bed, I wouldn’t have space for myself in the bed. M: Yeah, I know exactly. We would my sister and I would like, oh my gosh, this is so silly. She's gonna hate me for saying this on the podcast. But we would do this thing called a dolly hash, where we would take all of our stuffed animals combined - easily at one point, like 100 of them - we would (consumerism at its finest), we would cover our living room in them. And there's photos of me and my sister just passed out and you can't see the carpet. It’s the two of us, like asleep on our teddy bears and our parents like “What have we created?” H: I'm not gonna lie. If I were a parent and I came home to that I'd be thoroughly terrified. M: But imagination comes in a lot of different ways. I think we all have like daydreams about, you know, from our imaginary friends to like our dream jobs and things like that. And I think that plays into this question that I've had for a long time of like, idealism versus realism, because I feel like, you know, for me, I'm more of a cynic. I would say I'm more of a realist, I've always seen idealists as kind of living in their imagination, like, “Oh, you know, I'm gonna be like, some big, you know, music artist or something.” You know? And that's often sometimes like really hard to achieve fame in. And for me, that's part of living in their daydreams – living in their imagination. There's not something as real about it as like, having a structured salary, like the classic, you know, go to college, earn, like, six figures, you know, just go on to whatever you need to do next. So like, do you think that there's, like, idealism isn't what people should look for in life, especially in this day and age? Or do you think it's more, it's better to be an idealist than a realist? H: Okay, so I think there's value in ideal - I think, first of all balance of two. But I think there's value in idealism in the sense that you're much more likely to achieve something if you believe yourself that you will achieve it. So I sort of believe in the law of attraction and of how, if you really believe that you're going to do well on this test, then odds are you're going to do well. If you go out with the mindset of like, “Oh, I'm never going to achieve this anyways”, then the odds that you ever achieve it are so much lower. So idealism has value in the sense that like, if you're shooting so far, so high, and you're like, “I know for sure that later in life, I will achieve this, I will get this job, I will, like, be able to work with this and this and this”, then, even though it might not be fully accomplished, it still makes it more likely that it will happen just by you believing it. M: No, and I think there's definitely something to be said for that. And I think that there should never...it should never really be because I had to kind of check myself. I have friends who were real idealists. I'm such a cynic, such a realist. I–I'm very much of the mind that you have to make money and then follow your passions. You know, like make money, build yourself that nest egg, build your family that nest egg, and then go...paint. That's what, that's what I kind of grew up learning as well. And some people definitely have that mindset. But I think there's something that's braver about going to follow your passion so that you're not going into work every day doing something you hate, doing something that's not making a change in the world. I think like you said, it's everything in moderation. It's about finding that balance between what you're passionate about, and like, what's gonna make you money because, like, I read this statistic the other day that said - it was on UberFacts. So you know, obviously take this as what you will. But if you – happiness, sorry, money can buy happiness, if it's up to $70,000. Right? Yeah, once you hit that $70,000 a year mark, you're going to be – pretty much plateau of happiness, thanks to your money. And it's – your happiness is going to come through other things like love and family and when you're not thinking about your survival anymore. H: Yeah cause this is what, like Maslow's Pyramid of Needs. M: Yeah. H: It's like, if you can get a nice shelter, enough to buy you the food you want to buy, and everything like that, then that's covered by money. Self actualization, like your social life, that can't be bought by money. M: No, yeah, exactly. And so I think in that way, your imagination, like thinking about, “Oh, what can my passion be?”, like having – I think when you're little, having the freedom to explore that is also really interesting. Rather than just like, since you're five, being told you're going to be a doctor, when you grow up, you know? H: You know what else I think is really important that our generation kind of loses sight of sometimes, is that there's such a big dialogue about nowadays, “Oh, you should be doing your passion, you should be doing, like, living your fullest self at every moment.” And like, for a lot of people, they don't know what their passion is. I think too many people worry about if they're doing the right thing. Worry less about if you're doing the right thing, because at a certain point you stop – you stop living. If there's, you're like, “Oh, am I doing the right thing by doing a math major? Like maybe I'd be happier in statistics? Maybe…” You start asking yourself too many questions, then you get paralyzed by the choice. It's like, stop worrying all the time, if you're doing exactly the right thing, because things will turn out fine. M: Yeah, I really like that mentality. I think it is really applicable to the college student mindset, you know, in just that, like, it's so many kids are just like, “Oh, I'll figure it out eventually,” because they're like, paralyzed exactly by like, the amount of options that are open to them. Um, but okay, we've had, the deep conversation about, you know, what we kind of want to be when we grow up in terms of mindset, right? When you were a kid, what was your favorite imagination game. Because I also talked about, you know, games that build creativity in kids because I think that's something that is education is becoming going to focus more on - what was your like, when you were little like, what was your favorite imagination game? Like, did you play house? Did you play dress up? Like, what would you do that was an imagination game? H: Oh, so me, my sister or me and my cousin's. It's always with the cousins, by the way, for some reason. We would like create these like fake little shops on our roofs, we'd make like stands. And then we invite our whole family to like, come by our stands and pretend they were buying like stuff from us. So we'd like pretend we were a bakery. Pretend we were like a jewelry store, stuff like that. M: Oh my gosh, we literally – Okay, so I was I would do this daycare program after I finished elementary school because we'd finished the day of like, fifth grade, but my parents couldn't pick me up till 5pm when they got off work. So, I'd stay after school and we’d play like games. And there
