The only reason I am bored with Math is because I really don't see any major use for it in my life...and learning things that just don't mean anything (yet) makes me bored.
This is an argument I've been wanting to flesh out, so let me take the opportunity. I can understand the difficulty people have with seeing the point of math. I have a sort of PhD-level difficulty of the same sort in seeing the point of a lot of math research. I've heard some arguments about it, and maybe the arguments in favor of it are okay, but they are really unsatisfying and vague things like, "the "useless" branches of math help us to figure out stuff about the "useful" ones" or "you can't predict applications."
Anyway, there are a lot of reasons why I think it's important for people to learn some math. First of all, math IS useful in daily life. If you drive a car, turn on a light switch, use the internet, etc. We all know none of this stuff would be possible without math. That doesn't mean you personally have to do the math, but you do use other people's math all the time. So, maybe this isn't news to you, but there's another point lurking in the background here, which is the reason I'm even bringing this up. That's the fact that if math is useful for something, then there must be jobs where you can use it (this isn't an advertisement for being a math major--more like engineering). And what could be more practical in daily life than getting paid?
A lot people don't know what they are going to do when they get older. They may THINK at the time that they can rule out any possibility of anything that uses math, but they could be wrong. They at least have to try it out, and it's silly to give up at the first sign of difficulty or decide that all math is bad based on very limited experience of it. I never particularly liked math until I took physics when I was 17-18 years old and then ended up with a PhD in it (true, I didn't exactly struggle with it, but I didn't care about it, so I didn't have straight A's in math, by any means).
Here's another thing I like to point out to people who question the value of their math education. Let's say you are only going to use algebra in your job, and you're really annoyed that you have to take calculus because you're not going to use it. Well, if you think about it, the calculus is giving you a lot of practice with algebra. Trust me, the higher you get in calculus, the more pleasant grading students papers becomes in terms of the basic math mistakes. Some of that might be a weeding out effect, but I'm convinced it's partly because of all the practice the students are getting with the basics.
Finally, another point to bring up is statistics. Statistics are everywhere. If you want to be an informed person who can read news articles intelligently, you have to appreciate statistics. What does "statistically significant" mean? When does it make sense to draw conclusions about a large population, based on a relatively small sample? What are the pitfalls and fallacies in statistics? Can you trust that study you are reading about? Is it an observational study or is it a controlled experiment?
Even graduate students in statistics at top programs sometimes have trouble with these kinds of issues (in the stats class I sat in on, there was some example of this where even half the grad students got the question wrong--I can't remember what it was).
To learn statistics, you have to have some basic level of math. Calculus is desirable, although you can try to get by without it, I suppose.
To put it more concretely, maybe you want to know how risky it is to try smoking some marijuana or whatever (personally, I have no interest in drugs, except finding out what the deal is with them so that I can argue effectively about it). Well, what does the data say? How trustworthy are the studies? Are they randomized, controlled experiments? If not, maybe you should take them with a grain of salt. And maybe you should think about WHY it's important to have randomized controls and the advantage of that versus an observational study. I think this is really practical. Critical statistical thought.
I'm not really an advocate of the whole "learn math because it teaches you how to think" argument, so much, although I think it can help in certain ways if you are doing the right math (preferably difficult problems, so that you lean how to deal with being stuck, etc). But you have to question whether skill at math actually transfers to other things. And some of psychology's somewhat shocking results have to do with how little transfer there is from one thing to another in many cases. So, as a skeptic, you have to show me the data or give very strong, concrete arguments, and not just say, "math teaches you how to think".
