What to Do With Your One Wild and Precious Life
I’ve been finding myself oscillating lately between two extremes: a profound frustration with Exeter, and a euphoria at being here. Let me explain. I’ll start with the euphoria: since coming back to campus, and especially with the resumption of in-person classes, I’ve been walking along the trails, looking out my window, sitting at a Harkness table, eating dinner with friends, stopping in front of the Academy Building to look at the library lit up at night, and in these things finding deep joy, wonder, hope, excitement, gratitude, the feeling that there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be, that I’m in the right place, with the right people, doing the right things. It’s what Marina Keegan described in her essay of the same title as “the opposite of loneliness.” This is not something that’s a totally unfamiliar feeling, but it’s one that I haven’t felt in a while, between the pandemic and the various stresses of upper year. It’s the feeling that I know I’ll look back on as what I miss about Exeter. I’m still busy, of course, but (mostly) it’s the kind of busy that makes you feel alive, not the kind that makes you feel dead.
Now I’ll move on to the frustration. This is also not a new feeling. There are a lot of things wrong with Exeter, including the sluggish pace of institutional progress on race/ism, sexual assault handling, and so many other things, but what I’ve been thinking about most of late is the culture of achievement, college prep, overwork, and competitive suffering. Too many people here do things for a college application. It’s a little more complex than that, 1 but when it comes down to it, so many of Exonians’ choices are dictated by whether they can make one palatable on paper to a stranger in an admissions office somewhere sometime, palatable enough that one can be accepted to a college where one will continue to strive, achieve, “succeed.” This seems like a really silly way to live life. There’s a lot of focus on achievement at Exeter: can you get the grades, the leadership positions, the internships, the titles and trappings that announce to the world that you’ve done well? I think that what gets lost in all the achievement is the development. No one is going to read on your college application that you spent an hour every Friday afternoon lying on your bed staring at the ceiling and thinking, or that you went for daily walks with your friend, or that you stayed up late going down a Wikipedia rabbithole on the guitarist of Queen or the history of cartography or the Opportunity rover. But these ways of spending time might well be worth more for developing your own heart and mind than the
1 Anyone seeking a lovely, nuanced exploration of some of those complexities should read or listen to Erin Choi’s senior meditation.
leadership positions or SAT scores that you could have gotten by using that time for more clubs or more studying. These are the things that make you think, make you feel, make you be . Even subtracting college applications from the equation, Exeter has a culture that tells you that if you’re sleeping enough or have free time, you’re doing something wrong. We tell ourselves, and implicitly each other and the students who are younger than us, that we need to be doing something all the time. We need to be productive . What are we even producing? Whatever it is, it comes at the expense of our happiness, our health, and our sanity. There are strong links between sleep deprivation and stress, irritability, and depression-like symptoms. This is something they tell you in health class. But it’s actually something you should listen to. We need to sleep. We’d probably be happier if we slept more. We’d probably also learn more, both in our classes and about ourselves and each other and the world. But between heavy homework loads and too many extracurricular activities, we don’t, and that makes us less excited about what we’re doing, less interested in life, classes, and clubs, and less capable of doing meaningfully and effectively the things we do. Not all of this is on students — there are some teachers who assign homework like there’s no day-after-tomorrow, let alone other classes their students might be taking, and there are certainly many teachers who would never accept the explanation for incomplete homework that one had simply gone to bed early — but more of it than we’d probably like to admit is on us. And we perpetuate it, too. Way back in the day when you could walk into a crowded d-hall at mealtime, you would probably hear more than one conversation in which people compared how much sleep they hadn’t gotten. This kind of comparison would most likely come in the form of either an implicit or explicit one-upping. Why the hell would not sleeping enough be what we compete over ? It’s twisted.
Over the past year or so, I’ve launched a sort of private rebellion against this whole ridiculous culture. I took the radical step of consistently sleeping eight hours a night. I don’t really understand how I functioned without doing this my prep and lower years, but I do know that I used to fall asleep in class on occasion, which doesn’t happen anymore. The sum total of my SAT prep consisted of a single practice test. As of writing this, I don’t know how I scored yet, but it fundamentally doesn’t matter, because the SAT is a mind-bogglingly stupid waste of time, and I’d rather go to a college that appreciates me spending time doing the things I actually valued doing in high school than one that would prefer to see a perfect SAT score. And I don’t apply for things that I don’t think I’d actually enjoy. I considered applying for a leadership
position in a club that I’ve been extremely active in since my prep fall, a leadership position for which I am probably more than qualified; then I paused, and thought, what even is this leadership position? Sending a bunch of emails? Why would I want to do that? And I decided not to apply.
There are still parts of this culture that I’m complicit in, as much as I try to avoid it. I’ll admit: I’m overcommitted. I would probably be happier if I cut one or two extracurricular activities from my life. But I don’t do that, because I love the things I do, and I do them because I want to be doing them, because I enjoy them, because they’re fulfilling and exciting and fun. In other words, I do them for good reasons. And I still don’t sleep enough, and there are plenty of occasions when I do prioritize my homework over getting enough sleep, and I’m not proud of it. I’d like to believe that when I do that, I do it because I want to learn from the class just for the sheer joy of learning, not because of the grade. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it isn’t. I still would like to graduate Cum Laude, even though I can’t explain to myself why and it seems on all levels to be a thoroughly irrational and meaningless goal.
I’ll also acknowledge that I have a somewhat easier time spending my time on the things I value than some other Exonians would, because I have parents who let me do this. Not all Exonians are that lucky. But I think most of us, including myself, could still be doing better than we are now.
What we lose when we become buried in achievement, college, and competition, is the opportunity for our Exeter euphoria, for the opposite of loneliness. Probably the most common refrain that one hears from graduating seniors about what they valued about Exeter is that it was the time that they spent with their friends or the classes that they found themselves swept up in and passionate about or the spontaneous moments of joy and wonder, the moments when they were living for now and because now and in now. Why don’t we celebrate those moments more and seek them out along the way?
Imagine all the people living for today. When it comes down to it, we aren’t (or at least we shouldn’t be) at Exeter to be at Harvard in a few years.
We’re at Exeter to be at Exeter.
We tell ourselves that we’re taking advantage of the opportunities presented to us here by cramming, by staying up late, by packing our days with every imaginable thing to do under the sun. That’s not really taking advantage of Exeter. Taking advantage of Exeter really means doing the things that we do with intention, so that they have inherent value and beauty. It means going to Meditation and Assembly and listening thoughtfully, instead of going to them and mulling the things that you’ll do immediately after it, or, worse still, skipping them to do homework. It means spending time staring out your window at the snowy rooftops or the trees in bloom. It means leaving a few math problems undone so that you can sleep and get the most out of your math class. It means staying up late writing or coding or listening to music or talking to your roommate.
This is our youth. We’re so lucky to be able to spend it in a place where we can engage deeply as intellectuals, where we can host radio shows or observe stars or learn a new instrument or produce musicals, where we can do these things with other people who also care, who also see the world as a big, beautiful place, full of broken things in need of fixing, yes, but also full of joy and opportunity. This is our youth. It’s the only one we get. Let’s do it with purpose.
