Careful with "we." This narrowly achievement-based view of happiness is by no means universal. Thinking more closely about how such an upbringing differs from other possibilities—about the psychic as well as cultural roots of such an approach to bringing up children, about which traumas one inherits if that's the particular psychic context in which one grows up—will turn out to be valuable for you.

Therefore, in law school, the easiest way we think will help us achieve happiness is the same: meeting and becoming friends with our classmates, achieving the highest grades, going to a top-ranked firm.

Obviously a really terrible source. From that supposed definition, one might suppose there was no such thing as religion in human society, for one thing.

One great benefit of being at Columbia is that from CU Internet addresses one has free online access to the Oxford English Dictionary. That's the history and meaning of the English language, word by word. Looking up sacrifice there might be helpful for putting the word in a deeper context. The first (1597) use of the word for the denotation you are preferring may also both pique your interest and offer a small enlightenment.

The suggestion is that once we give it up, we may not be able to get it back.

Such people might tell you that a real life lived in the law doesn't consist of choices among those "paths." Such mentors would probably point out that life trajectories lived by people they admire took many turns through different roles in different areas of society. They may say that part of what made admirable those people they admire was the breadth of experience that contributed to their lives. At any rate, you might want to give some thought, and conduct some conversation with knowledgeable people, on the subject whether "narrowing" paths is one of your strategic objectives.

No matter what, I expect that if I am able to learn practical skills while I’m here – to work with counsel and learn how to counsel, then I may feel like my time here was worthwhile. This might mean “sacrificing” black letter law classes, leadership positions, or time spent memorizing out-of-date cases, but in order to get what I really want from law school, I’m willing to do so.

That's not sacrifice in any of the meaningful senses: that's a matter of agreeing to give up what you don't think you want, otherwise known as giving away ice in the wintertime. It's a negotiating tactic, not a valid form of self-investigation. Good thing, wrong place.

Expecting law school to reinforce your character is probably not a good bet either.

There are relationships with other human beings that will occur, not a relationship with a law school, or some fragment of its operations, that will contribute to your personality development (including "character management") during this very significant, rather short, phase of your life. But they won't determine whether you become selfish: They will affect the development of your self.

This last seems a correct conclusion. If the purpose of the draft was to make sure you could take the step to arrive there, it has served its purpose well. I think there are two points through which it might now turn into something serving the "next" purpose for you, beyond this strip of territory so expensively achieved.

1. The philosophical importance of the definition of sacrifice arises from a basic, realistic insight that like most realism is hard for people: every human choice involves loss. This reality, like other realities against which human beings protect themselves at all costs, by dissociation, in order to avoid going crazy—the inevitability of death; the inadequacy of marriage; those cases in which parents don't love or even like their children—is surrounded by anxiety even when it is for a moment forced into conscious view. Young adults want especially hard not to see that reality, even in less socially-uncertain times than the present: faced with plethora of choice at the inexperienced onset of adult responsibility, they like to narrate to themselves situations in which nothing is lost by the choices they are making. Is it not particularly appropriate that the OED can show you the modern dissociative, rationalizing denotation of "sacrifice," as utilitarian algorithmic living, growing out of a poem about two adolescents whose dream of choice without loss is going to wreck them and everything around them? So perhaps the next coasting destination, as you navigate yourself towards open water, is to accept that choices involve losses but life's course is too inventively uncertain to make calculating gains and losses from moment to moment a sufficient, or perhaps even necessary, mode of self-understanding.
2. Knowing that you are not "going to fall prey" is an important step. Feeling hunted is not a good mood in which to do planning. But the form of words is still holding a real meaning: you aren't ready to see yourself as the hunter rather than the hunted. Lawyering is making things happen in society using words. No matter what you use your skills for—whether you are choosing prey for virtue, or for money, or for sport, you are stalking a locale in society, some place, some time, some action, in which mechanisms you have made with words are going to make something advantageous happen. Even if no one is going to lose—which isn't usually the case—you were preying, not being preyed on. That's the job.

Nevermind the overwhelming amount of sometimes tedious work or the lack of practical training. Nevermind how the curve is undoubtedly a terrible method for encouraging learning through collaboration. Nevermind how my time with my family and friends shrink.

What is Happiness?

What to "Sacrifice"?

It's a good first draft, because as you all but say yourself, it's clearing the table for serving another question.

What the present draft says, I think, is that actually reviewing critically your relationship with law school (in order to decide, for example, whether to continue after the first year) requires breaking a repression, allowing the doubts and ambivalences to surface, if only for the purpose of demanding from law school that it do for you what you need.

So, the next draft is really about undertaking that process, at least so far as to articulate what you, personally, based on your experience so far, need from law school.

Evaluating Happiness: Rejecting Cognitive Dissonance in Law School

The Set-Up

Most of us want to say that we’re happy in law school and that we made the right decision in coming. That’s because before we started, we all had our reasons. We want to become a lawyer, perhaps, or make money, help people, change the world, figure out what to do with the rest of our lives, or even keep learning about how society functions. Whatever the reason, and whether or not it was a good reason, we committed (unless we drop out) close to $270,000 and 3 years of our lives.

So then we find ourselves here. But, there can be an overwhelming amount of work. There is nearly no practical learning at all. The curve is undoubtedly a terrible method for encouraging learning through collaboration. There are court opinions that are tedious. Classmates’ opinions sometimes lack substance or significance. Time spent with friends and family shrinks.

But we’re still happy. We have to be, or it wouldn’t be worth it.

The Rationalization

Over the past few months, I’ve constantly been asked, “Do you like law school?” And every time, I have answered affirmatively – that I like it and I’m happy. I’m enjoying the readings and the new historical perspectives I’ve gained, my peers are intelligent and I like a good number of them, and I’ve been challenging myself to become a better speaker and writer. I’ve been asked so many times, that it’s practically rehearsed by now. I like the internal consistency, as people often do.

The Rejection

But then came one day, “I hope that’s the case, but I’m not sure I believe you.”

I’m not often accused of lying, although, when that sentence was uttered to me, I also don’t think it was meant as an accusation of a lie. It did force me to consider the set up that law school puts us in. We pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time in law school, so we must be happy doing all of the readings, attending the firm lunch receptions, and meeting overworked attorneys who come to invite us to join them.

It made me consider that I need to seriously evaluate if I’m happy in law school by simply following the steps that Columbia has so nicely laid out for us, or if there are other steps that I could be taking instead.

The Happiness?

Still, even now, I’m not sure where happiness, for me, really lies. But, recognizing that the dream that society has pushed us to pursue leads us to sometimes conflicting goals is a start.

In terms of pursuing happiness in law school, there are two different types of happiness that are at stake. First, there’s the kind of instantaneous, literal happiness that we can feel. The other happiness is a more long-term happiness of accomplishing things that we believe will contribute to our future happiness. The uncertainty in evaluating our future happiness results in a conflict between immediate gratification and possible future fulfillment. The result is that we might not pursue what we enjoy now because it conflicts with what we believe we will enjoy in the future.

I don’t have a be all and end all solution for that conflict. But, there are steps that we can take to ensuring our happiness. For example, social psychology has suggested that there is at least one thing that has been proven to make us happier: giving to others. In relation to while we’re at law school, even though we might have no money to give to others, we can certainly give our time to those who need it.

Another step we can take is to evaluate what has made us feel the best in the past. Looking back to the list of things that has made me enjoy law school, I’ve noticed that for the most part, the list was all about myself. But if the question were changed to, “What have you done in the past few months that have made you feel the most accomplished?”, then I would have a significantly different answer about when I was actually able to help someone else instead of myself. That answer might be different for other people, but I think that the answer is worth exploring before any of us commit ourselves to the firms and institutions that we’re directed towards.

Being at a world-class legal institution means that we should have confident optimism about our futures, but only if we are truly pursuing things that we actively reflect on as making us happy. Undoubtedly, we don’t want to start reflecting on ourselves 20 years from now, only to realize that we never took the moment and asked ourselves what we truly enjoyed.

So, am I happy? I’m still not sure, but I’m certainly not going to fall prey to an internal need for consistency, or anyone else's definition of happiness.