Quirkbag Collection #61 – 27.09.26
These days, I find myself repeating a catchphrase in my mind: “This is not the part of your life where you should be miserable.” That’s a mental cue I keep to remind myself of how I should be thinking about my daily life in university, especially when stress levels rise.
For a long time, I associated being in school with studying hard. Somewhere along the way, school became the place for me to do well, incredibly well, no matter the price. Unsurprisingly, I inflicted a lot of misery and stress on myself. (That did not help with my pre-existing feelings toward school.)
But lately, some things have changed. Reading books on philosophy, productivity, life and time management, I find myself downloading a new ‘operating system’ for my life. Having left the peak of academic grind, I now spend more time figuring out how to live my life, a good life. Part of that is a decidedly new perspective on university – a complete flip of my previous approach.
Instead of trying to mindlessly over-achieve on some arbitrary, superficial benchmark of “success”, defining what success and experience I want has taken centre stage. (I’m still working on that…) Of course, that comes with a new set of problems and frustrations.
But perhaps the crux is that I still consider being here a win by itself, and that unlike my former years, university is meant to be the final, fun checkpoint for self-discovery and social thrill in a special environment.
Living Autonomously, Alone
University is a huge change in life tempo. For all the coming-of-age movies featuring high schoolers moving into their college, parting ways with their old lives, they got at least one thing right – freedom. Maybe NUS does not have the insane parties like those colleges in Hollywood movies, but there is a newfound sense of freedom that brings both relief and anxiety.
Yes, your schedule is not fixed (depending on what events, communities or projects you join or undertake). Indeed, lectures are all in different venues, at various times, and the workload is always decentralised and pesky to track.
You no longer make friends by default (out goes the Primary School mindset, sorry) despite meeting plenty of new people.
Freedom to try new things, meet new people or just “be an adult” is daunting. Spiderman’s story tells us that “With great power comes great responsibility”, but so too does great freedom. We might even struggle to navigate this newfound freedom.
But something hardly advertised on brochures is how unprecedented freedom may engender a gnawing but underlying sense of loneliness. No, it is not that the system isolates you from people. Nor does John from your Accounting module hate you.
It’s a by-product of superficial encounters, created by the shuffling of students (aka you and me). It’s a cliche, but quality really means more than quantity.
You might have heard your parents or relatives say that “XX is where you meet your lifelong friends”. Take that with a pinch of salt. Maybe two. One other thing not plastered on signboards is that you get out as much as you put in – for classes, projects, friends and everything else.
In understanding that, I realised just how limited my capacity for work really is.
Romanticise University Life: I Can’t Help It
Nonetheless, it’s not a “bipolar-type” scenario where I am engaged and happy in the day but crumbling mentally and emotionally at night (though that may be true for some). But it’s not Walter Mitty’s life either.
In the months leading up to university, I developed a rosy view of university – damn can those YouTube vlogs be alluring. I always felt that university was a place to find and live your best life, (though I now question: when is it ever not the right time to live your best life?) in what is a special and ephemeral phase of life. Expectations can be a deadweight sometimes.
University is an ecosystem for you to find your identity, providing platforms for you to grow. The caveat is that you have to be up for it, physically and mentally.
It’s not difficult to realise even the most fun-packed, experience-filled 4 years will still only be a fraction of what university offers. You’ll need several lifetimes in university to “try all the rides” in this theme park.
I doubt I’m alone in my romanticisation of university. Certainly, my reason is not unique. Part of it is to make up for lost time. Like a crashing building in an earthquake, I had the sudden realisation that youth is not forever and that this phase will eventually end.
On some level we all know it, we all understand it, but we simply think we always have more time. The recent changes in my perspective led me to see how I missed out on “life”, being so academically pre-occupied previously.
Looking back at the past is easy, especially indulging in nostalgia and wistfulness. Someday, our current moments will become nostalgia material and perhaps we all ought to prevent them from becoming regrets.
The Compass of University: Your North Star
The idea of university is a platform for further education jammed with experience and fun. Or at least that’s what I hope. It’s not always clear what to do in university without a clear purpose.
If you’ve been stuck choosing between rollercoaster queues, it’s practically the same thing. As a freshman, chaos is the beast I have to tame frequently. This beast resides in my Google calendar. Choosing what to do, when to do, how to do and with whom to do it is difficult.
Everything feels right, but everything is not possible. What then?
Something I wish I learnt or realised earlier is that what you are “supposed” to do is not always the “right” thing to do, no matter the situation. But you should always do the right thing, in any situation. The “right” thing is not always intuitive.
Confusing “studying” and even “working” (which we are supposedly ingrained to do) is not always the “right” thing, at least not all the time. I have gone for a movie night despite having a tutorial to finish, because the “right” thing was not optimising every day for academia.
The “right” thing was actively living a different life. That’s a difficult and uncomfortable choice to make.
Having a North Star to guide your decisions eliminates (or at least alleviates) the discomfort of dedicating your time, energy and even money to one thing instead of the opportunity cost. Optimising your choices for one goal – whether it is experience, fun, friends, portfolio etc – reassures yourself that this choice is not in vain.
Even then, the discomfort can be palpable. But hey, that’s growth. Afterall, you can’t go through university treating it like JC or High School and expect a different experience.
Did You Remember To Make Friends?
Just because Vin Diesel said “I don’t have friends” does not mean you should follow suit. Unless you can back it up with “I have family”. Making friends can be an elusive concept and activity now that people are all “grown up” and have “their commitments”.
Making friends was easy as a seven year-old because proximity and a lack of emotional filter were a deadly combo. So long as you went to class, you were almost guaranteed to make 1 friend. It could be with those kids who could not play soccer, or those kids who played the same video games.
Now, things are different. People are more guarded, more cautious, more self-driven to do things they prefer. Exercising their autonomy could mean sidelining you. Harsh, but true.
Yet, it’s also the best place to meet new people because everyone in the ecosystem wants to “meet new people”. We seem to think that will cure our emotional void and spew rainbows in our lives. Not entirely true.
Making friends requires real connection. The simplest test is to remove the stimuli that created your encounter with each other. Without the thing that brought you together, do you still have any reason to meet them?
Probably not, and another one “bites the dust”. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Perhaps what we look for in friends is something literally – people to sit with, to argue with, to steal food from, to share secrets with and maybe fall in love with. The price we seem to avoid paying is the emotional vulnerability and longevity of the relationship.
So I guess we all could use a course in friendship.
University Is A Phase (That Will End)
I never really stopped to consider if what I want out of life can indeed be attained through a university degree. Hell, I never even considered not going to university – it was always something I thought was a rite of passage. I would not even know what to do otherwise (which does not forbid well).
But as someone who never liked school (for the last 12 years of formal education), I always saw each year in passing as a stepping stone to the next. Every class was just one step closer to taking the exam, which determines the class I will go to next year.
Clearly, I never really lived “the teenage life” – the gaming, partying, sneaking out, heartbreaks and everything else in between – I did practically the opposite. So perhaps the change in mindset is long overdue.
Regardless, the benefit of hindsight and nostalgia brings the unexpected benefit of foresight. If we could engineer our life choices to optimise for a more vibrant, experience-filled life, instead of a mindless, default one, hopefully we look back with more joy, fondness and nostalgia than what we feel now.
Perhaps then, I would be convinced that I lived a good university life, well.
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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, or not.
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