“What are you doing next year?”

This time of year, many seniors have come to dread that inevitable — and daunting — question.

People have all kinds of plans, and many of us legitimately do not know. Yet amidst all the uncertainty and confusion, nothing came close to what I was about to hear. Without even a twist of her comely, deceptively-innocent brow, she spoke with a voice full of the confidence of four years of liberal arts education and other worldly experience:

“I’d like to do something good for humanity … or make a lot of money.”

Or??

I try to avoid these kinds of conversations with girls I’ve just met, especially girls I meet in a bar, but, like Oedipus, I just can’t help myself. For the next 30 minutes, I argued, pleaded and wailed to convince her that these were not mutually exclusive outcomes. But my efforts were in vain: She had placed her options on the scales of self-reckoning, on which corporate law — as long as it pays, of course — was just as poetic as writing poetry, just as compassionate as philanthropy and just as rewarding as teaching or pediatrics.

“I’m going to give to charity,” she assured me (or herself?).

Of course, as I was trying to explain to her, one can do something good for humanity and make a decent living at the same time. Or perhaps before: Many of us are going off next year to Teach for America (TFA), work at an NGO or do something similarly decent. Then, with penance done and resume burgeoned, you are off to law school or business school, to make the dough. In my case, I am pursuing economics with the legitimate intention to improve the welfare of everyone. Except, I’ve found myself applying for investment bank internships for the summer … because they pay. A lot. And this money will help pay back my student loans.

I guess we live in a world run on money, and we are all implicated. But it would be unfair of me to imply that this is the same thing as greed. You do what you have to do to pay the bills: Education costs money; a house costs money; healthcare costs money; food costs money (especially if it’s healthy — just look at Green Café).

This is not to say that high paying jobs, like corporate law and investment banking, don’t do a productive service in our society. They are a feature of civilized existence, to be sure. But at the beginning of college, most of us arrive idealistic. Just reread your application essay. By the time we get to our careers, we are actually trading off between money and humanity, substituting between a nice house and Habitat for Humanity, a nice dinner out and giving money to famine relief, TFA and career development.

Our lives were not supposed to be this petty. In 1931, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that our generation would no longer need to work for money. He believed that rising economic productivity, “science” and “compound interest” would produce a society in which money and materialism had become things of the past. In this society, Keynes writes, “It will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance ...”

He was absolutely right that many in our society would achieve an amazing standard of living. Just note all the iPhones and nice cars and nice clothes that we — the children of today’s workforce — sport everyday. Sadly, Keynes was dead wrong about not needing to work in order to have an iPhone, so many of us still seek to sell ourselves for these means of life.

In the end, perhaps the need to work for our existence is not a bad thing: We don’t want to end up like the humanity depicted in Wall-E, reclining on a hover chair by a pool 24/7, too obese to walk, and communicating only through video messaging. Work gives us meaning, purpose and determination, allowing us to achieve together as human beings. And, at least for the time being, there is certainly much challenging work to be done. We need people to fix broken education systems, eradicate diseases, end genocide, fight corruption, stop injustice, report the truth, solve poverty and hunger and crime and many other things.

Seeking the solution to these problems is not part of some overly utopian, communist-socialist society. Rather, each of us can make the world better through the capitalist system. In short, we will shape the world through the very jobs we will take when we leave college. We can be part of perpetuating more of the same into 2030, 3030 and beyond. Or we can choose jobs that may pay less, but make an impact and are rewarding to both ourselves and others.

Working hard (for humanity)? Or hardly working? There is that “or” again.

On the other hand, maybe I am wrong about this and the girl from the bar was right. Perhaps she will sleep just as soundly on her bed — made of money — as anyone else. Or maybe we are both wrong and the blind pursuit of money is also good for humanity, because it will help create the wealth of tomorrow. As Keynes writes, “The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not.” Since Keynes was writing in 1930, we have (at least) another 20 years left.

So if you do something good for humanity — “cultivating the art of life itself” — good for you. If your job is bad for humanity, I hope the money will make up for it. For your sake, more than ours.