passionless by Aiden H. '28

I’m not typically one for year-end reflections or goals, mostly treating New Year’s Eve as a reason to make a charcuterie board and talk to friends instead of a day of radical change and contemplation. I mostly believe in what Lorde has said about how people don’t change day-to-day or even year-to-year, but instead every four years. That a year ago will never seem too far but four years can feel like a lifetime.

But I digress, because this year I actually do have thoughts, just noting that I say “this year” but in reality it’s just where I’m at right now, which may or may not be what I was feeling earlier in the year, or even last year.

This was a year of deduction. This is a pretty normal time in most people’s lives to feel like there are a million possibilities, and I feel like I have pretty confidently reduced the paths I feel willing to take. Nonetheless, I want a year of assertiveness, eagerness. It’s much easier to know when you want to do something rather than write something off forever.

I feel overwhelmingly passionless. If anything, my passion is searching for one, wanting so bad to have some hyper-romanticized, tortured-artist, “I-did-it-because-I-can’t-live-without-it” mindset.  I feel a lack of satisfaction, of vindication, in my life choices because I lack this internal drive for anything I could fill my day with. I’m not sure about engineering, but I’m less sure about everything else. I get a stronger and stronger feeling that this isn’t it for me, that every pset is a day wasted when I could be doing something greater. This is almost definitely self-destruction, but how am I supposed to know if I need to destroy everything around me to move on in the first place?

Famous billionaire biotech big-name and also MIT professor Robert Langer⁠01 he made Moderna and a shit ton of other things came to speak to our 10.10 class.⁠02 Intro to Chemical Engineering While my professors and peers were praising him, wanting so badly to be remembered, I couldn’t have cared less that he was there. Not that I don’t respect him or his time, it just wasn’t any more invigorating than a normal lecture. The way I’ve been explaining it is if you put a bunch of political science majors in a room with the president, and one kid just couldn’t care. How could you not? Is this not the peak of the career you could ask for, the greatest dream you’re setting yourself up to have?

When I allow the pipe dreams to take over, I break free from the non-existent shackles around me and become some sort of philosophical revolutionary or breakout singer or public figure or insanely popular twink actor,⁠03 a la timothee chalamet, nicholas galitzine, etc. not Bob Langer. Why do I find these lives inherently more interesting than the geniuses around me? I think I am just bored by the civility and mundanity of a middle-class suburban lifestyle, but when faced with an interesting, important life that I could very reasonably attain, it garners the same level of disgust. Do I only want lives I can’t have, or do I want lives that give me the most attention? Does it matter what I do or how people view me? I must be less of a pessimist than I thought, believing that these fantasies are possible, much less actually desirable and fulfilling.

I just feel like I can’t say I’ve lived if I haven’t experienced everything. I want to be an engineer 1/100th of the time, and a doctor, lawyer, pop star, president, author and everything else the other 99% of the time. I fully feel able to do anything I want, so where do I start? It’s a privileged and pretentious question, but still a depressing one, feeling as if I’m always making the wrong choice. So I choose to stay still.

I found a half-baked essay vaguely about sleeping through life that I started one night in January. While most of it isn’t great, I find this paragraph mostly still resonates:

Perhaps instead I’ll be one of those heavy sleepers who eventually isn’t.  Maybe there are fame and accolades ahead of me. Once I grow old and my back hurts in the same way it always has I’ll write an autobiography detailing what was waiting outside of the twin XL with the $30 mattress topper. It all started on a hot summer night, I’ll write, because naturally nothing happens in our lives during the cold winter except bundling up to protect ourselves and the cycles of human hibernation. I was in a bar on the Lower East Side, two places I have never been to, and it is because I have never been to them that I can think of them this way: means of a better life that are, for the moment, inconceivable. Of course I wouldn’t write about the years in which I slept. That’s not what people are interested in. I’ll write in a passing note in the introduction how “my childhood years were spent in a typical fashion” and they were “nothing of interest”. I’ll only look back to give supplementary information to the details of my “awoken” being, like stories of trauma or places I met key characters; the stuff that really gets people going. For now I just sleep through these years of preface and in the passing moments in between, I daydream–for what is sleeping if not a reason to leave where you are–about the stories that will fill that book.

I think this all comes from my permanent urge to escape, eternally assuming the grass is greener on the other side and then clawing and weeping my way back when I realize I was wrong. I flee to places, either literally or into daydreams, hot with the fever of purpose. And eventually I get bored, and then feel trapped, and then choose something else.

“When everyone’s star is bright
Brighter than you are
It’s time to go
And you’re the only one left
Dancin’ while they’re on the floor
Time to go”

Paris, Texas – Lana Del Rey⁠04 It might be a little too Tumblr-coded to post a Lana Del Rey bridge and call it the poetry that explains how I'm feeling, but that's who I am and I believe it to be true here.

The first time I was actually able to do this was leaving home to come here to MIT. And while I’m glad I don’t go to school near my hometown, I feel a certain air of regret. Not that I made the wrong decision, necessarily, but that I hyped it up too much only to become envious of the lifestyle I vehemently rejected, the peers I judged. It’s not so much that I want to do blackout Wednesday at some house party with people I barely knew or liked from high school, but at least those people know what they’re choosing. It feels more childish and regressive to act like moving to a city will change anything about it, like some annoying lead in a movie about someone moving to the Big City and all the Crazy Times and New Friends and Unexpected Challenges they have. But then why do I find hope so cringey if it’s what I’m asking for?

Next year, I’d guess nothing will change. But then again, I’ll turn 20, which is still not an adult but noticeably not a child. It has a different ring to it, all hard and consonant-y, sounding more aggressive and forward out of the mouth than the delicacy of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. The images of both are so striking and specific. A twenty year old jumping in a dark club. A sixteen year old driving on the sunny coast. A twenty year old screaming and crying at their first true losses. A seventeen year old experiencing their first love. A twenty year old racing between the different paths of their lives. An eighteen year old dutifully reciting the plan for theirs every time someone asks.

Everything is better than when I was 16, though. But it’s not even as clear-cut as “everything is better, I’ve never felt worse”. It’s “everything is better, and I’ve never cared less about the fact that it’s going well”. Everything is better; I feel just the same. At best I’m cautiously optimistic and at worst anxiously moribund.

I feel at a crossroads between nothing, stuck between people and places and desires.

But isn’t this when all the interesting things happen?

this week, I got a tattoo of my mom and sister's birth flowers

note I did not get this out of crisis and did plan it out for months and have always wanted tattoos

I officially do not endorse getting tattoos during crises lol

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