Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers.
Recently, the Indiana Daily Student published a column that said making a playlist is an easy way to romanticize everyday life. Another way to romanticize everyday life is to love life every day. Like curating a playlist, curating your week with experiences worth replaying is essential.
And there’s no better place for that than college. In many ways, campus life is more natural than so-called “real life.” It hearkens back to another time when people walked, ate and lived together, before the isolation of cars, delivery apps and apartments and suburbs with nameless neighbors. While college campuses aren’t untouched by modern developments, they form strange environments where third places — places between home and work where people come together — persist alongside them. Greater society has largely lost these places, but colleges remain home to clubs and student organizations, sporting events and downtown hangouts.
Most of my week is laid out with at least one thing outside of class pulling me in a different direction: student government claimed my Monday night, Coach Cignetti’s talk at the IU auditorium my Tuesday night, and a club meeting my Wednesday night.
While breaks, like winter break, make compelling cases for doing nothing all seven days — and breaks may offer time for that — life takes on its shape through particular activities and the immediacy of doing. Without these experiences, life becomes abstract, a vague thing to be grasped at, not something with tangible parts that can be known and cherished. The more things — or more quality things — that make demands on you throughout your week, the better.
Burnout and overcommitment are concerns. However, sluggishness and wasting away are causes for as much, if not more, concern. In finding the middle road, it’s safer to err on the side of exhaustion from taking on too much than regret from the hindsight of possibilities lost in time. As it happens, discomfort about the hour-by-hour loss of possibility is called boredom. It serves as a reminder when life feels out of our hands. Then, the anxiety that comes from our awareness of lost possibility pushes us toward a particular kind of life, a life that we can say we know and own. “Doing” makes our life our unique way of being in the world. And as they say, variety is the spice of life; varied activities will reveal the countless possibilities hidden within each of us.
Adding more to your calendar is a life-affirming decision. It also affirms the beauty of humanity we find in diversity. Although what you do with your time won’t be the same as what I do with mine, this makes for a tapestry of diverse interests that strengthens the IU community.
So, fill your week beyond the basic obligations.
In summary, I propose three additional (and practical) benefits to this:
First, a busy schedule frees you from procrastination’s shackles. It allows no time for delay. You just have to go, and you have to do. I discovered this early in college and began doing something I never considered in high school (no matter how many agenda books they gave us): making a to-do list.
Second, a rich schedule enriches your social circle. Seeing and being seen by other people is the real value behind doing more. We find new parts of ourselves in what other people see.
Finally, hitting the pillow at night feels all the better when your feet have been hitting the ground all day. Sleep becomes a reward, not just a necessity and enjoyment, and it ceases to feel like overindulgence or wasted time.
Since the new year, the Indiana Daily Student has published another column that critiqued New Year’s resolutions. The writer said, “Instead of choosing a specific occasion to commit to resolutions we should be able to work on ourselves at any point of the year.”
While the new year is a perfect time for resolutions, so is a new week. And as you make playlists for your life and weeks, find the dances and movements — the activities — to go with.
Eric Cannon is a freshman studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government.
