The British journalist and human-behavior expert Oliver Burkeman wrote in The Guardian:
When you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure.” Almost all the time, by definition, you’re not at the place you’ve defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you’ll find you’ve lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose–so you’ll formulate a new goal and start again.
When I taught at high school at an “elite” private school in the Bronx, most of my students looked at their classes as transactional experiences: They wrote articulate, well-researched history papers, and I give them A’s. Despite the stellar work, I found little love of learning for its own sake among my students; rather, it was about getting through high school as fast as possible.
To get to what, exactly?
For most of them, it was whatever highly competitive college they wanted to go to. Which they then raced through as fast as possible to get to…. what? Medical school, law school, business school, or their hedge fund job.
And then what? They got the grades, they got the job, they earned the money. Maybe a few of them found love along the way, but more of them found hookups. Where is the meaning in their lives coming from?
The renowned psychologist Martin Seligman’s research, which founded the field of positive psychology, demonstrates that there are five elements to a fulfilling life, which you can remember with the acronym PERMA:
Positive emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Achievement
Note that the thing that all of my students were chasing–achievements–is only 1/5 of a satisfying life. There are four other parts that don’t have anything to do with accomplishments, degrees, jobs, or money.
Therefore, as Burkeman noted, there are serious downsides to finding purpose in your accomplishments–especially exclusively in your accomplishments–because then you will continually set new ones–and so you’ll never be where you want to go. You can’t possibly get “there” if you keep changing the finish line.
In the spirit of this quotation, I urge you all to embrace your time as a college student. Take a class on a subject you think you’d hate–because you never know, and when will you have the opportunity again? Study abroad and experience a new culture for a few weeks or a few months. What will you learn about yourself?
Don’t make your experience at Macaulay Honors College at QC a transactional one. I hope you’ll embrace learning and enjoy the journey, not merely the diploma at the end.
