Wanting to Do Everything by Richard O. '28

If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say, “this year went by so fast,” and other phrases of the sort, I would have a lot of pennies in the month of December. Piles of them. Every single year. But as cliché as that line becomes in the last few weeks of the last month, I’ve started to feel the weight of it a lot more recently. In some ways, I feel like I’ve aged enough in a year at MIT to have gray hairs coming out of my scalp, but in others, it feels like January started last week. And as grateful as I am for being where I’m at today, realizing how fast a year seems to go by now compared to how it felt in high school has made my pursuit of doing everything feel even more dire. That feeling of not having enough time to do the things I wanna do has become so commonplace that I often forget why it is that I want to do so many things to begin with.

As a result, there have been many days when I find myself stuck trying to figure out the best way to do as many things as I can (Allison explains this feeling really well in her Life in the Fast Lane blog). One afternoon, I’ll be debating between going to a speaker event or meeting up with friends for food off campus, and another, I’ll be trying to rush a Pset so I can go take photos of a dance performance in the student center. And while I do enjoy the wide variety of things I’m able to learn and experience, I’ve come to realize that my obsession with trying to do more doesn’t always equate to being the most fulfilling. There are some evenings when I simply prefer to just lie on my bed and listen to music for hours on end without moving a muscle. Others where I prefer to lie on a couch and just read a novel until I fall asleep. And every time I find myself wanting to do something I enjoy, I end up spending more of that time thinking about all the other more “productive” things I could be spending my day doing.

Looking back, I’ve started to pick up on this pattern more recently and have been trying to understand why it is I always feel like I have to be doing as much as I can during my time at MIT, and it’s all boiled down to moments like the end of the year, when I realize just how quickly time seems to move on. Two years ago, I applied to this school, and now I’m already almost halfway done. And while a couple of years still sounds like it’s far away, I figure by the time I get to graduation, I’ll be earning my own pennies from saying “college went by so fast” and “the time seemed to fly by.” And even beyond just college, I’ve found myself realizing that I’ve also been plagued by this fear of life as a whole being really short (which I partially blame this chart I saw on Instagram one day for) and not having enough time to experience as much of the world as I want to before my bones start creaking. And while I realize that I’m definitely still too young to worry about getting old (though a lot of my friends will joke that I’m basically pushing 40 now that I’m 20), I still recognize that a lot of the opportunities I have access to now may never be available to me again after these next few years of college.

So with all of this in mind, I’m slowly starting to learn that while it’s definitely possible to opportunity-max my experiences these next few years, I might find more value and more of myself in doing things for the true sake of wanting to do them rather than for the sake of collecting as many experience badges as I can – as fast as I can. It’s hard to know which choices for the activities I choose to do will align with my view of the best future for myself, but I think part of the joy of living is literally not knowing what’s going to happen next, because if we did, then there would be no memories to be made. So as I continue to get my pennies in the years to come, I hope that I come to enjoy slowing down and can appreciate all the ways I decide to use my time, no matter how fast life seems to be moving.