Collectively Having More Fun
No More Normalizing The Grind
Devna Panda
While I begin each year with a vision of the many adventures I want to embark on and how I want my daily life to feel, it's not long before I begin feeling like I am serving my schedule far more than it is serving me. Although it is my senior year and my academic workload feels more manageable, I find that I have taken on far too many commitments in anticipation of this lighter course load.
This realization begs the question: why is it that I and so many of the highly motivated individuals around me choose to pile our plates with an inundating list of engagements rather than take time for ourselves? I find I severely underestimate the amount of time I need to simply exist as an individual, filling every moment of free time to the point where I begin to feel I don’t have a second to myself or for the hobbies and adventures I was hoping to spend more time on. My vision for this year had been to buy a film camera and stay committed to running. I wanted to create a digital diary, a place for me to document my senior year. While I have been going on runs, I find that it’s a part of my life I consistently fail to prioritize. The digital diary remains woefully uninitiated.
In a culture that swears by the grind, we are constantly surrounded by rhetoric that glamorizes working all the time. I can’t go a day without refreshing my phone and seeing productivity influencers flood my feed. These individuals flaunt their 4:30 a.m. gym routine, protein-packed meals, and 10-hour study sessions. While there is nothing necessarily wrong with choosing to live this way, I’ve found from personal experience that being endlessly busy depletes me more than it replenishes me. At the end of a particularly busy day, I feel wholly drained, with nothing left to give to myself.
A few weeks ago, I was walking through the Knoll on a day with particularly lovely weather. The sun was shining brightly behind me, and there was a vintage clothing sale on the lawn. Students were milling around the clothing rack, making conversation and basking in the sunshine.
Suddenly, I found myself struck by an awareness of the sheer beauty of this moment and how it would never return or repeat itself. This time next year, I would be somewhere else, and while I wasn’t exactly sure where that somewhere would be, I knew it would not be here. I had been rushing home to start an assignment, but I decided to stop for a moment. Instead of continuing to my apartment or giving into my baser instincts and reading a book for class, I merely lay down in the grass. I tried to take note of how it felt to be where I was and what it would feel like when this moment was nothing more than a memory.
I’ll be the first to admit it can be incredibly difficult to sit yourself down and reevaluate your entire life—when you’ve already made certain commitments, there’s only so much you can do even if you know you’ve taken on too much. What you can do is take time to slow down, even amidst the bustle of daily life. A matter of ten minutes can make a world of difference in helping you to feel that time is not just passing you by. It can remind you that you are a human being rather than a human doing.
My resolution is to take action more quickly and carve out specific times where I can do the things that are meaningful to me. Tailor your life so that it works for you, rather than falling into the trap of working for it. For me, I planned out what times during the week I can go on runs, come rain or shine, and my film camera is set to arrive in a few days.