Quirkbag Collection #65 – 25.10.26
When I entered university, I told myself that I would make an effort to explore life beyond what I have always done in school – study. Instead of prioritising a perfect grade, becoming a top graduate or squeezing into some list of academic elites, I decided to dedicate more time to having fun, meeting people, learning about life and optimising for an adventure.
I simply want to make up for lost time.
The switch is harder than it sounds. It seems like going from hard-mode to easy-mode, but really, it feels more like a different kind of hard.
Making An Intentional Choice
Choosing to prioritise new experiences intentionally does not necessarily mean an easier alternative compared to studying. Whether that’s me playing pickleball, squash and floorball all for the first time ever, it can feel so uncomfortable doing something you have never done for a reason you have never had. (I would have scorned 3 years ago if anyone proposed the idea of pickleball over studying.)
Believe it or not, trying something out for fun and experience when it means forgoing the time spent doing something academic can be a hard pill to swallow. Especially if you are someone like me, who struggles to make peace with “good enough”.
It is precisely this switch that showed me how much of my life I never lived. When intentionally choosing the “easy” and “fun” option feels uncomfortable and downright wrong, it makes me shudder to think what life I actually have. Whose life am I really living?
The biggest struggle is accepting the pains of identity change. It can be really hard justifying new choices compared to your default ones, no matter how intentional they are.
We change our minds overnight, but our identity and values possess far more inertia.
I struggle so much trying to convince myself that the choices I made are justified; that having fun, meeting new friends, trying something different are just as important.
Purposely making choices in line with this new narrative of exploration and adventure is incredibly uncharacteristic of my old self. That feels like a huge hit on my identity.
An Uncomfortable Space of Growing Pains
It can be really hard trying to stick to your new way of making decisions, especially when it’s new enough to give you the thrill and excitement but not yet incorporated in your life to give you the assurance of a desired outcome.
There is a palpable temptation to revert back to your routine – study hard, keep your head down, walk the same safe path, never look back.
But I think I had enough of that.
Novelty is a double-edged sword. It brings you an adrenaline rush, but it also scares you into discomfort. That space you are navigating between your old life and the life you are trying to live…that’s where you feel growing pains.
This is the part where you almost feel like a piece of metal expanding and contracting rapidly due to extreme temperature fluctuations. Nothing feels right. Nothing feels intuitive. Everything is effortful.
As I try to find my footing in this new uncomfortable space, there are positive realisations. I enjoy being incredibly bad at pickleball. I enjoy playing squash even though I barely ever hit the ball.
But I doubt the enjoyment really came because of the sport. Rather, it came because of the experience and adventure it represents.
And that remains worthy of pursuit.
There is a sweet spot that lies slightly beyond my comfort zone, but not too far that it becomes too physically or mentally challenging. Playing for the fun of the sport taught me that life has a simplicity we somehow always overlook.
If we could change our lives to maximise the fun, experience and enjoyment, who wouldn’t? This feeling is deeply intoxicating. But alas, reality is immutable like Newton’s Law of Gravity. The clock always strikes twelve, the glass slipper always falls.
We all fall back down to earth.
How do we make the identity shift permanent?
The Fear Of Invalidation
If there were no stakes to life, by that I mean no jobs, reputation, validation, opportunities that hung in the balance as a consequence to our actions, it seems likely more people would try more, and dare more, and do more, not just in university.
If universities graded students purely based on effort, consistency and quality of work rather than bell curves and exams (and I am over-simplifying for abstraction), I would bet that more students would enjoy their university lives.
Of course, a non-trivial number of students would drop out since they do not get the academic rigour they might so enjoy. Therein lies the complexity of university – everyone tries to get something different out of it. But yet, we all converge back to that piece of paper we call a “degree”.
In a previous post, I mentioned that we are all subconsciously yearning for external validation. When we know a certain task or pursuit is not likely to create that, we might simply avoid doing it. (Afterall, why do something pointless?)
We are all afraid of being invalidated by others, because we want to feel like we are worthy, cared for and important. We crave the certainty of “getting somewhere”.
Perhaps that’s why we choose the safer academic route over more personal, experiential ones. We know that if we do it right, it leads us somewhere we recognise. A job, a career, a network…the white picket fence type stuff.
Choosing the unexplored and unknown personal or experiential path offers no certainty, but all the fun and thrill life has to offer. The very pointless thing we try takes on new meaning because we choose to pursue it for its own sake. We are living.
And sadly, that has become, and is increasingly, harder.
New Reason To Feel Terrible
Now that I am optimising for experience, fun and meaningful engagements beyond academia, reconciling a noticeable decline in academic outcomes is unexpectedly difficult.
Of course, this is natural, logical and, if anything, to be expected. Reducing the time, energy and effort spent on work yields a less desirable academic outcome. But you cannot really picture or feel it until it actually happens. Until reality hits, and new consequences of your new actions come.
This is the trade-off that I am not prepared for.
Intentionally forgoing a tangible, measurable and almost prized academic outcome for a personal and unobservable pursuit can be extremely disturbing. It feels terrible to know that your choices, however intentional and personally meaningful, directly caused a “drop in grades” (a phrase I feel objectifies a student) without anything similarly concrete to show for your optimisation of personal and experiential pursuits.
Worse still, our personal pursuits get tainted by the judgements and criticisms of those who do not optimise their lives like us. It feels as though we have traded validation for triviality.
Learning to embrace “good enough” as someone who has gotten used to “not good enough” is practically fighting against my own nature.
Deep down, we are all afraid that fewer outwardly success means that we are of less value and less worthy in every way – that we have “fallen off” instead of “moved on”.
We are afraid that if we do not have the same metric with which to compare ourselves with others that we will be insufficient and unworthy.
But that only means we are still living life on people’s terms. And what better reason is there to get through the growing pains to the other side?
An Irony Of Growth
Navigating this uncomfortable space of growing pains brings struggle that easily feels self-inflicted. But no one who chooses growth does so unless they believe the result and “other side” would be a better place.
Perhaps the environment and system in which we operate and live are not suited to encourage such growth. Public measures of success and value will never disappear – society is constructed that way. But what we could all use is a belief in our personal definition of self-worth and identity.
We yearn to be “successful” without really defining it for ourselves – then tear ourselves apart trying to meet someone else’s ideal of “good enough”.
The tension between pushing your identity and choices toward your meaningful life and the pressures of life pulling you towards the familiarity of your old life routines can be unbearably high. That’s why it is called growing pains.
Yet, if you know there is more to your identity, how could you not try and pursue it?
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Hi! I’m Zac, the guy behind this serendipitous, quirky blog. I’m currently on a quest to find out more about myself – who I am and what life has to offer. This blog is my little space where I step out of my comfort zone to share my thoughts and life experiences. I hope you enjoy reading the weekly posts. Share them if you like.
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