Today’s youth have been indoctrinated to believe in cramming every minute of every day full of purposeful activity. Princeton students seem to revel in perfecting the art of superhumanly busy days. After talking to my friends at other colleges, both public and private, it seems to me that not many other schools exhibit this phenomenon to quite the degree that Princeton does. Even though my friends do complain about their workloads, in general they seem to be enjoying a fairly relaxed pace of college life, full of leisurely study breaks at the local coffee shops and spontaneous debates and gossip-fests that last well over the allotted mealtime. During my time at Princeton so far, I have seen very little of the above, except perhaps during freshman orientation, when the sledgehammer of homework had not hit yet. Most Princeton students’ schedules are a frantic blend of class, studying and enormous time-sucking organizations and activities like sports, theater, music, a cappella, journalism or dance. Even when there are a few extra minutes to spare, it becomes another excuse to carefully squeeze something else in. The seven-minute walk to class becomes the ideal time to call your mom. The five minutes before class starts are the perfect time to check your e-mail and reply to the barrage of invitations to various events from a multitude of clubs. Every minuscule part of the day is scheduled to move students further along the path to ultimate success in life.
On a recent gorgeous sunny day, I was fortunate enough to have a couple of minutes to sit outside and eat lunch before heading in for a precept. As I perched on a bench, I relished being able to just relax in the light autumn breeze and balmy sunshine. As all good things must come to an end, however: The alarm on my cell phone went off, and I dutifully headed inside to my precept. One of my classmates caught my attention when I walked in the door, having seen me partake in my lunch outside on the bench. “You looked so happy,” she commented, with a slight note of wonder in her voice. To most people I know at Princeton, simply sitting outside and enjoying the gorgeous weather is a foreign concept. It has no end or purpose and won’t achieve anything in the long run. Yet sitting there was one of the most serene and content moments of my week. To me, that makes it just as important as checking off the five million things on my to-do list before I go to bed at night.
We Princeton students are the epitome of the multi-tasking, super-busy generation. Our compulsive obsession with always being industrious (and thus productive) has led us to be unable to step out of the all-consuming vortexes of our schedules. We have lost the ability to see “doing nothing” as vital and important of a skill as being able to do everything at once. Here the activity of relaxing seems to have the negative connotation of sitting there and doing something that has no other end than to make you happy, a major taboo. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. So maybe it would be helpful if Princeton did put bathtubs in its dorms. After all, what could be more conducive to promoting relaxation then students having the option to stew in tubs of hot water for a couple of hours?
Kelsey Zimmerman is a freshman from Glen Allen, Va. She can be reached at kzimmerm@princeton.edu.
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