Dropping the (balancing) act

I am sitting in a bakery in my hometown, digging into a salted caramel brownie, when a friend asks me. He is my age, but he is embarking on the second of two gap years before college, and so he is understandably curious.

“How many hours of work do you have a day?”

I take a bite of my brownie and use the time to think.

“I dunno,” I finally spit out. “I just kind of work until I go to bed or until I go out. I’m never really done, exactly.”

Maybe it’s a symptom of our overachieving generation, but Princeton students are perpetually busy. How many times a day do you hear or use the excuse, “I can’t today. I’m too busy.” If it’s not schoolwork, it’s some all-important extracurricular or internship application or job that makes it impossible for us to hang out with friends or go out or even eat a meal.

Strangely, though, it’s not that we don’t spend many Saturdays on the Street or a few too many hours in the dining hall some nights; it’s that we think of these moments in terms of what we could — what we think we should — be doing instead. Life at Princeton is a perpetual balancing act, and while we’re expert acrobats, we’re constantly worried that today’s the day it all falls apart.

Grade deflation is our go-to scapegoat, but I think the real cause runs deeper. Call it perfectionism, anxiety or the inevitable result of a single-digit acceptance rate: Princeton students are driven. We know that every grade matters, that every internship application we send out could be the one that leads to a summer offer and, maybe, to a post-grad job. On bad days, the anxiety spirals so far out of control that every decision suddenly affects every other decision. It reaches a point where we can’t fathom spending a full eight hours sleeping: If we don’t start this problem set and reread that paper, we’ll never be successful at Princeton and then after Princeton and then we won’t live happily ever after.

Okay, okay: Deep down, we know that’s not how it works. We know that a less-than-perfect exam grade won’t really matter in five years, that not finishing the reading in time for precept isn’t a huge deal. But for some reason, we rarely allow ourselves to recognize this simple fact. Last year, for example, one of my classes required biweekly papers. In theory, because the assignment was identical each time, my fellow students and I should have eventually learned to budget our time and get the thing done well before the Monday noon deadline. Instead, though, I spent every other Sunday night working frantically alongside other students, even if I’d begun the paper much earlier. It somehow felt necessary to feel stressed about the assignment, to work right up to the deadline for me to feel that I’d done my best. If I’d spent the night, say, sleeping instead, I would have felt guilty turning in the paper well-rested. I would have felt like I hadn’t given it my all. For Princeton students, it seems that it’s never a matter of being done; it’s a matter of doing as much as we need to in order to stay one step ahead of the anxiety.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure what the solution is. It’s hard to change a culture of overachieving when so many students fundamentally want to overachieve. And more than a cultural phenomenon, it’s a personal one: Our guilt about not constantly working is rooted in a personal desire to succeed. Still, visiting friends at other schools, I am always struck by how peculiar our way of life is. It’s not that that students at other schools don’t work as hard — have as many hours of class, are involved in as many extracurriculars — as we do. But they do these things and are done. They don’t think about their work in the same shades of gray as many of us do.

I wonder, then, if the solution is to set benchmarks for ourselves, to allow ourselves to cross things off our to-do lists. To finish a paper after two drafts or to only apply to so many internships. To reach a point where we’re allowed to be done for the day. We deserve to spend a night on the Street or just hang out with friends without feeling guilty. After all, there’s always tomorrow.

Cameron Langford is a sophomore from Davidson, N.C. She can be reached at cplangfo@princeton.edu.