A whole lot of us are doing things terribly wrong. So wrong that 72% of the American workforce is currently disengaged from their jobs, and almost 90% can’t contribute fully at work because they don’t have passion for what they’re doing.

That’s depressing.

Even worse, instead of trying to fix the situation, it seems like we’re pushing more and more youngsters into the same devastating fate. Colleges are reporting higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression than ever before. And yes, it’s still a rising problem even when we account for the fact that students today are more comfortable seeking out help than past generations.

At this point, the race for the Ivy Leagues and competition to get into the best.school.ever could easily overtake baseball as the national sport. But for what? Overworked, burnt out kids are getting into prestigious schools to chase prestigious jobs that they’re ultimately miserable at.

The system is broken. Big time. Even though we’re bombarded by the message “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” people are still staring down the walls of their cubicles and wondering how many sick days they can safely get away with. Not to mention, the “do what you love” message comes with its own set of paranoia.

“What if I have no idea what my passion is?”

“How do I even start to find it?”

“I know what I love, but it’s probably not going to pay me and now I’ve got mountains of student loan debt. Plus, it’d be nice to have a few bucks to hit up happy hour with my friends on Thursday.”

Unfortunately, while college may teach us what to learn, it doesn’t teach us how to figure out what we should be doing with our lives, or how to make money at professions that aren’t established like law, medicine, accounting or marketing.

So, what’s the answer? The current method of throwing high school grads straight into college to choose a major and “figure it out” isn’t performing very well. I propose we start encouraging students to do things differently:

Take a Break

Conventional thought says that we should go to college right after high school, choose a career path before we’ve even had to do our own laundry and then grind away the next four years in one of two places: the library or the bar.

But why?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to go out, see the world, distance yourself from the soul-squashing arena of high school and actually live a little before jumping into the next stage? What’s the rush?

By a show of hands, let’s see who didn’t completely throw away their freshman year in the basement of a run-down house doing beer bongs until 3 in the morning. Very few of you probably have your hand up. And even if you semi-straightened out your priorities by sophomore year, that’s still a whole 9 months of cash, time and brain cells that could have been better spent elsewhere.

A more productive option would have been to take a gap year. Studies show that a reflective gap year is one of the best ways to prepare a student for college and life beyond the safety net of mom and dad.

Gappers report higher levels of self-awareness, maturity, confidence and direction after their time off. They also get better grades, are less likely to party their faces off and sometimes graduate faster.

Considering that the average four-year degree is a mystical unicorn — today’s “four-year” students take five years and eight months, on average, to earn a bachelor’s degree — a gap year doesn’t sound like such a crazy idea.

And before I get furious emails from parents accusing me of convincing their kid to push off college, know this: 90% of students who take time off go back to school within six months of finishing a gap year.

If your kid is on the college track already, a year spent broadening his horizons isn’t going to convince him to set up shop on your couch — in fact, when I interviewed gappers and their parents for a book I wrote on gap years, I found quite the opposite was true.

Students who’d had a chance to breathe told me they felt more prepared and more excited to pursue a degree than if they’d gone straight to university after high school. Parents of gappers unanimously agreed that their child was far more mature, thoughtful and focused after their time away.

Do Weird Shit

To use a totally overused, cliché story, Steve Jobs put fun fonts on the first Mac because he took a random, one-off calligraphy class ten years prior. The point here isn’t that every writer references Steve Jobs in articles about how to better your brain, but rather that exposure to weird, unrelated, exciting stuff is the best way to foster innovation and creativity.

Unsurprisingly, it’s also the best way to figure out your passion. After all, if you haven’t done much besides play on the varsity lacrosse team and study for the SATs, there’s less than a zero chance you’ll be able to easily identify what you love.

How can you love something if you don’t know it exists?

Now, sure, there are people who get lucky in life. I have a friend who fell in love with photography at the age of ten, and ended up traveling with every major rock star of the last three decades as a tour photographer.

But honestly, that’s highly unlikely. The vast majority of us have no clue what we want to do with our lives. Hell, people in their 60s still don’t know what gets their blood moving.

Don’t be one of those people.

And how do you not become one of those people? Do weird shit. And keep doing weird shit until you find the one weird thing that you don’t want to stop doing. Then, do everything in your power to make that your life.

Hint: once you find it, “everything in your power” doesn’t feel like a chore. It feels like freedom.

Screw the Naysayers

I won’t harp on this one because it’s been written about by nearly everyone. But the thing is, haters gonna hate. Sometimes they don’t even mean to do it.

For example, my mother is a lovely woman. We have a great relationship now, but when I was growing up, things were tense. As I got older, I realized: it’s not about me. The problem is that my mother and I have very different ideas of success. She values nice things and security. I value autonomy and adventure.

There’s nothing wrong with either of those definitions of success, but because she’s my mom and it’s her job protect me, she tries to force me into her idea of success, which is the only concept of success she knows. Once I understood why we kept butting heads, I was able to start overcoming my knee-jerk reactions to prevent myself from getting upset. As a result, our relationship improved drastically, and it’s a lot easier to go about life on my own terms.

My point is this: you do you. The rest will fall into place. And when you make it, all the people who told you that you couldn’t do it will probably just shrug their shoulders and say something like, “Hm. Who would have thought?” And then they’ll get on with their lives.

Or maybe they’ll get jealous and hate you. Who knows? Either way, it doesn’t matter.