Why do I need to learn math if I’m going to be a humanities major?
The short answer: you don’t.
Your textbooks try to give you plenty of examples how you might need algebra or calculus in your life, some of them fairly contrived. In fact, you can survive and even have a perfectly good career without knowing math beyond calculating whether your local department store having a 20% off sale gives you a better deal than Amazon.
There are also many other things that you don’t really need in order to have a perfectly good career. Like art, sports, love, and other similar things that some people do give up because they require work and commitment. I grew up an emphatically non-athletic person, and I almost gave up on aikido – twice, and I’m so happy I had it in me to try the third time because otherwise I would have never learned that my body could actually do things I never thought it capable of.
Imagine you give a smartphone to a toddler, what would he do with it? Most likely pound the floor with it or use it in his wooden block construction. A preschooler might be more advanced and learn to call Grandma and play a few simple games. But it’s not until later that a kid will learn how to install apps and realize all the possibilities a smartphone will give her. Imagine her giving up on smartphones altogether because they don’t work very well as building blocks!
A human brain is a zillion times more complicated than a smartphone, and humans have to spend many years learning all the amazing stuff it can do if properly trained. Math, or, more precisely, logic and abstract thinking of the highest degree, is not only amazing stuff in itself, but serves as a foundation for a lot of other complicated mental processes. Why would you want to stop exploring it when you’ve just started?
At this point you might say “I’m just bad at math and I don’t think my brain is designed to handle it”. “Bad at math” is one of the most infuriating expressions ever invented. I guess it can be used to mean you’re not cut out for a career as a professional mathematician, or you have a dyscalculia (a math-specific learning disability) but much more often it just means you failed to solve problems you were given in class and somehow decided this failure has to define all your future relationship with math. Imagine a toddler who falls up a few times, plops herself down and says “I’m just bad at walking”.
Training your body or your brain takes a lot of work and more than a few failures, errors, and disappointments. Not all of us can become Olympic champions or professional mathematicians, but most of us aren’t even close to discovering the limits of what our brains can do. Enjoy the journey!