cookies by Aiden H. '28

Call it big-boned or call it taste, but I’ve always loved cookies.⁠01 ice cream is so meh why wouldn't you eat a cookie instead?? I grew up as a massive baker, and every December I take it as a mission to bake as many cookies as possible and hand them out to people I know–meaning keeping a gallon-sized Ziploc of cookies in my middle school backpack, slipping them under the desk to friends during class.

So the other night, on another casual thought spiral about the innumerable delights of cookies, I realized how many idioms about cookies there are, if not the most of any dessert. I count six for cookies, four for cake,⁠02 The icing on the cake, the cake is a lie, to take the cake, and cakewalk one for pie,⁠03 Humble pie and zero for ice cream.⁠04 Aiden: 2 Ice Cream: 0 There can only be one anthropological and etymological answer: cookies are a foundational part of human nature, and their significance is represented in our phrases.

Because of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about what cookies could mean to me and MIT culture, and how all the phrases work together.

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Smart cookie (or, doing well)

So you grow up “gifted and talented” or whatever. But this is almost definitely a reflection of sociocultural factors and your willingness to be quiet as a child and not your passion about math or whatever.

But you enjoy it, but who wouldn’t? Things are easy for a long time, and you don’t walk around telling everyone about how “great” you are, but adults will tell you and eventually you believe it just a little.

Eventually you do have to start making a choice, and you make a good one–to try. You actually can be interested in the things you’re doing, and past the expectations of what you should be doing, you do it anyway because a part of you just likes it and it helps you in the long run.

Everything is sweet.

If you give a mouse a cookie (or, getting addicted to success)

Soon you’re not so special, and that’s fine because that’s being a person, but so far your only thing has been being special, so who are you?

You’re a person who clings to it. You try even harder. It’s an easy spiral to go down, and one you get tunnel-visioned into every couple weeks without realizing it.

If you give a mouse a cookie, it might be able to recognize itself quickly as a junk-food junkie. But if you give a mouse a cookie and then surround it with other cracked-out mice running in circles and snorting chocolate chips, the mouse is gonna think they’re pretty well off. They have “balance” compared to the other mice.

And then you snap out of it as soon as you get a little burnt out and remember that nothing is ever that deep that you need to major in finance or understand what YC does.⁠05 I genuinely didn't learn about what it stood for or what they do until last night when HackMIT kids told me

You feel trapped in the bubble of it all though, you know?

Accept all cookies (or, how much of yourself to give away)

You gave your life away to work at age 15, and you’re already pretty tired. You would rather be doing a lot of other things that most teenagers probably would. But now it feels all you have to look forward to is work, because you spent the fun part of life working, and you can’t realistically spend the work part of life just messing around. Adults tell you all the time to enjoy the now, that soon all you’ll have to do is worry about work and bills, which feels ridiculous, because all you do and all you feel you’ve ever done is worry about work.

But then every couple days in class, your professors talk about how you’re going to use something in the real workforce one day, and you remember that this whole thing so far hasn’t even been work, it’s literally just been the training.

This is still the training?

You debate about if you’re committing too much, because on the surface everyone talks about work-life balance, but secretly you know that you still have to be successful on paper to get everything you want. But now what you want is to be successful on paper, so everything is getting hazy.

You remember a triangle you saw once:

It’s an oversimplification, sure, but you’re also able to trace back everyone’s life ever to the triangle, so you buy into it.

You know exactly which one you’ve always given up.

Hand in the cookie jar (or, humility)

So you realize it’s pretty bad because even your Spotify Daylist is starting to call you out.⁠06 angry crash-out anxiety tuesday evening What do you do when you’re caught red-handed in an emotional nightmare? You project it onto others, duh! You remind yourself that you could have it so much worse and you give advice to others about how to fix their own problems, because if you can subconsciously convince yourself that you’re doing better than others, then that means you’re probably just whining about your problems and they’re not real.

And then someone gives you advice (that traitor!) and it feels like a slap to the face that people around you can see how bad you’re doing.

Tough cookie (or, resilience)

Stepping away is hard (recall, you are still a cookie-junkie-mouse-human hybrid in this scenario, after all). You don’t know what to cut out first, but even the act of recognizing it is relieving.

You cut out things that are purely pompous. Yeah, it’s on your LinkedIn or resume or whatever, but who are you doing this for? And some things you do still feel a little performative, but you still have to do it for general society/job market/success criteria. Because you know this, though, you commit yourself a lot less.

At the end of the day, you realize people who do this much calculus should be able to take care of themselves, because they know how to and just choose not to. So you grow a little better at it, and over time you don’t feel like you’re dying. Busy and dying are not the same thing, and you start to accept it.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles (or, the stupidest saying of all time)

Bullshit. Not only do sayings like this defend every bad thing that’s ever happened, but they remove any sense of control you have over your life.

You are choosing to be here. You do not have to go to class every day, you want to. And while the two options of summer vs. MIT feel like two extremes, you’re still picking one extreme over the other, and you can very well reverse it. If you had literally nothing to do and the world at your fingers, you would still probably gravitate towards learning about what you are right now anyway, but you’re naturally curious, and that will never change.

I don’t want to be 55 with an awful job and no memories just shrugging saying “that’s the way my life worked out”. That’s how it worked out because that’s how I chose it to work out.⁠07 This is coming from the extreme privilege I do have about education/career/lifestyle such that I can decide how I want my life to look in most regards

This is all easier said than done. I write on here like I’m so emotionally enlightened and then go crying to everyone around me that I don’t get anything I want or my life will never work out how I want. And it probably won’t work out how I play it in my head, but it sure as hell won’t be because “it is what it is” but instead because I have the highest of hopes for myself, which isn’t always a bad thing to have.

Even with it all, you can always just calm down and eat some cookies.

a box of cookies a friend bought for a truly horrendous 10.10 pset night

eating these while I write this

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(violate these rules and the cookie monster will get you)