What My “Useless” Liberal Arts Degree Actually Taught Me: Hint: It Wasn’t Political Indoctrination. It Was Perspective

For decades we’ve heard the joke.

Liberal arts majors.
 English. Journalism. Film.

Four years of college just to ask one question:

“Would you like fries with that?”

But what if the real value of a liberal arts education has never been about salary?

In this episode, George reflects on his time at the University of North Texas in the late 1990s and the classes that unexpectedly reshaped how he understands the world.

Economics. World geography. Environmental science. Media history.

Not indoctrination.

Perspective.

From realizing Christianity represents only a portion of the global population, to recognizing how media narratives are constructed, to understanding the historical patterns behind the rise and fall of empires.

Those lessons feel more relevant than ever in a time of political polarization, shifting global alliances, and an information ecosystem built to amplify outrage.

A liberal arts degree may not guarantee wealth.

But it might make you harder to fool.

 This podcast reflects personal experience, opinion, and information drawn from publicly available court records and historical reporting. It is not intended to assert new allegations or to characterize any individual beyond matters established in public proceedings 

Transcript

George TenEyck 0:00

Welcome to Confessions of a Gen X Mine. I'm George Tinike. In this episode, we're gonna shift gears slightly from the family dynamics and mental health focus we've had for the last month. Today we're talking about the degree that made me harder to fool. There's a long-running joke about liberal arts degrees. You've heard it. If you study English, history, film, or journalism, congratulations. You just spent four years and a lot of money learning how to ask a very important question. Would you like fries with that? The younger crowd has even updated the line. Put the fries in the bag, bro. It's one of those cultural punchlines that never quite goes away. Liberal arts degrees are mocked as impractical, useless, a fast track to underemployment. And to be fair, the criticism, it's not entirely wrong. A liberal arts degree is rarely the shortest path to a six-figure salary. But here's the part of the story that never gets told. My college education did something more valuable than increase my earning power. It made me harder to fool. That sounds dramatic, but it's true. Because when I showed up at the University of North Texas in the late 90s, I thought I knew how the world worked. I was there to study media, journalism, film history, broadcast production. That was the plan. What I did not expect was that the classes outside of my major, radio, TV, and film, would end up reshaping my worldview far more than the ones inside the major. Economics, world geography, environmental science, business law, contract law, real estate law. Subjects that had nothing to do with cameras or microphones on the surface, and everything to do with understanding how the world actually functions. When I arrived at UNT, Denton still felt like a classic college town. Music everywhere, coffee shops, the flying tomato pizza joint that everybody loved, student newspapers stacked by the door. This was before social media. The internet was a thing, but not quite like it is today. Before smartphones, we had flip phones, but not iPhones. Not even BlackBerries yet in 1999. If you wanted to debate politics or religion, you had to actually do it face to face. And those classrooms were full of people from very different places. Students from small Texas towns, students from the Dallas and Fort Worth suburbs, and international students who were experiencing Texas culture for the first time. For a kid raised in a fairly contained evangelical environment, it was new territory for me. Because suddenly the room contained more than just one worldview. And when ideas collide in an open environment, something interesting happens. Certainty loosens its grip. Not because someone forces you to abandon your beliefs, but because you start encountering other perspectives that are just as internally coherent as your own. The story becomes more complicated, and complicated stories are usually closer to reality. The funny thing is, none of the classes that shifted my thinking were actually in my major. Journalism taught story craft, media history taught context, but the courses outside of the department expanded the lens. Economics forced me to think about incentives, not intentions. Incentives. People respond to incentives. Government responds to incentives. Markets respond to incentives. Once you see that dynamic, it becomes very difficult to believe simple explanations for complex economic behavior. Business law introduced me to the mechanics behind contracts and systems that make commerce possible. Environmental science introduced something even more sobering. The planet operates according to physics and chemistry, not political ideology. Those classes were not ideological, they were analytical. They gave you tools. And once you start seeing systems instead of slogans, it becomes much harder for anyone to sell you a neat little story about how the world works. I remembered the moment the evangelical bubble started leaking air. I wasn't a full believer, but I was quite familiar with the rhetoric and the mindset of the evangelical community, talking about revelations and raptures. Once the bubble started leaking air, it wasn't a confrontation. There was no professor standing at the front of the room declaring that everything I believed was wrong. It was something much simpler, a map, and some statistics. In a world religions discussion, we started looking at global demographics, and suddenly something obvious became impossible to ignore. Christianity is the largest religion in the world, but it's not the majority of humanity. Roughly 30% of the planet identifies as Christian, which means that most human beings on Earth are not Christian. They're Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, followers of traditional folk religions, or not religious at all. That realization lands differently when you were raised believing Christianity was the obvious truth for humanity and the only way. Because suddenly a question appears that never really occurred to you before. If billions of people live their lives inside completely different belief systems, maybe the story you were handed about being the center of the human narrative is not quite as universal as you once thought. It's not an attack on faith, but it's perspective. And perspective changes everything. Once you've seen the map, it becomes very difficult to go back to the smaller version of the world you grew up with. Another thing that happens when you start learning broadly is that myth begins separating from mechanism. Ancient cultures interpreted natural events through stories, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, eclipses, comets streaking across the sky. If you didn't understand tectonic plates or orbital mechanics, those events could be explained through mythology, divine anger, divine warning, divine intervention. Today we understand most of those as naturally occurring phenomena. We understand those through geology and physics and astronomy. Science doesn't answer every question, I'm not saying that. But it answers many of the things that used to belong exclusively to myth. And once those mechanisms become visible, the world becomes less mysterious in some ways, but also more fascinating because reality is complex. And complexity is far more interesting than simple stories. One of the stranger experiences came a few years after those environmental science classes, because around the time we were learning about groundwater systems and energy extraction, something started happening outside the classroom. Fracking rigs started popping up all over North Texas. Suddenly the theory from those lectures was showing up in real life. Debates about aquifer pollution, concerns about induced earthquakes, questions about energy independence and environmental risk. These were no longer abstract classroom ideas. They were happening just down the road. That's another lesson from college that stuck with me. Real-world issues are rarely simple. They involve trade-offs, economics, science, and politics. Sometimes unintended consequences, and almost always more complexity than the headlines suggest. The class that probably shaped my career most was media history, because that class teaches you something very important: that stories are constructed, narratives are framed, images are edited, music is added to trigger emotion. Once you understand how media is produced, you start seeing those techniques everywhere. Political messaging, cable news, social media feeds. You start noticing when outrage is being manufactured. You start noticing when fear is being used as a shortcut. You start noticing when complicated issues are reduced to villains and heroes. That does not make you cynical, it makes you alert. And in a world where information travels instantly, that awareness becomes a survival skill. Studying history introduces another useful habit, pattern recognition. Historians often say that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Empires rise, they expand, they dominate economically and militarily for a period of time, and eventually they reach a point where maintaining that dominance becomes harder than achieving it. The Roman Empire controlled much of the Mediterranean world. For centuries it appeared permanent, but internal political instability, economic strain, and military overextension gradually weakened the system. The British Empire once controlled territory across the globe. People used to say that the sun never set on the British Empire. Yet, two world wars, economic shifts, and independence movements eventually reshaped that reality. Empires rarely collapse overnight. More often, they slowly transform into something else. Studying those cycles removes a certain illusion, the illusion that any nation exists outside of history. Even the most powerful ones, especially the most powerful ones. That brings us to the present. Many economists and historians believe that the United States may be entering the latter stages of its global dominance. Not collapse, but transformation. You can see the signs in the global landscape, alliances shifting, trade patterns evolving, new economic blocs emerging, groups like BRICS Nations bringing together major economies that increasingly cooperate outside of the traditional Western system. At the same time, the United States is experiencing a strong isolationist current. America first, a nationalist impulse to pull inward, to disengage from global alliances, to question institutions like NATO that have structured international cooperation for decades. Those tensions reflect a deeper reality. We live in a globalized world. Supply chains cross continents. Financial markets connect nations. Technological innovation spreads instantly. No country operates entirely alone anymore. So when a powerful nation begins debating whether to retreat from global engagement, the question becomes larger than politics. It becomes historical. Where does that decision place the nation inside the long arc of an empire? This is where the liberal arts perspective becomes particularly important when theology meets power. Because politics and religion have always been intertwined in human history. Faith itself is not the issue. Millions of Americans draw meaning and moral guidance from religion. That's nothing new. The tension arises when theological prophecy begins intersecting with geopolitical decision making. Within some evangelical traditions, world events are interpreted through the lens of biblical prophecy, particularly the book of Revelation, wars in the Middle East, alliances involving Israel, global conflict. For believers, those interpretations can feel deeply meaningful. But when that mindset enters national policy discussions, the stakes change dramatically because foreign policy is not a theological exercise. It involves real nations, real wars, and real consequences, and sometimes nuclear weapons. History has shown repeatedly that when leaders believe that their nation has a divine destiny, the results can become unpredictable at best. Policy decisions must be grounded in strategy, evidence, and reality, not prophecy. So no, my degree didn't make me rich. If maximizing income had been the only goal, there were more efficient paths, like business or law. But what my education gave me was something else. Context. Economics taught me that incentives matter. History taught me that nations rise and fall. Environmental science taught me that reality does not negotiate with ideology. Media studies taught me that stories can be manufactured, put those together and you end up with something valuable, perspective. Because once you understand how complex the world actually is, simple answers start looking awfully suspicious. When someone says one nation has a divine destiny, pause. When someone claims that ideology explains everything, pause. When someone tells you that the world is divided neatly into heroes and villains, pause. Check the map, look at history, and ask better questions. That may be the real value of liberal arts education. Not prestige, not salary, but curiosity, skepticism, the ability to recognize when someone is trying to sell you a story that's too simple to be true. In an age of algorithms, outrage, and manufactured narratives, that skill might be more practical than people think. Because if you can't be easily fooled, then you can't be easily manipulated. And to me, that's worth far more than the punchline, even if someone still wants their fries. This is Confessions of a Gen X Mind. I'm George Tenike. If you like what you heard, check out all of our episodes on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Also check us out confessions of a gen X Mind.substack dot com for the companion essays to all of our episodes. See you down the road.