LIFE 163: The Life Crisis

So I may only be a junior in college at this point, and I may be worrying a bit overly about something that will work itself out in the end, but it's worth noting anyway: I feel old. I don't mean, of course, that my head is balding or that my joints feel more and more brittle. Granted, I'm still pretty young in that respect. But being on the eve of my senior year and feeling the daunting task that is going to be graduating (including thesis-writing and class-passing), finding a job, and leaving Stanford, it's starting to worry me.

I'm sure I am no where near as frightened or worried as some of the seniors are right now. And, of course, I don't blame them. Naturally, I am also a little bit tired of this campus, feeling a bit underwhelmed by what it has to offer me and taking every opportunity I can to escape from it. The environment here is just too tense and too pressured, sometimes it really makes me wonder how tough the pressure must be in places where it isn't always sunny and 75 degrees. But perhaps in those places it is easier to get off campus. Unless you go to Cornell. But, that's another story.

The point is that being at this point, this cusp, if you will, and about to enter my senior year and to prepare for the outside (or "real") world can be a frightening affair. Case in point: I was walking to class today, humming along faintly to my iPod, carrying my Nalgene and my over-the-shoulder bag, trying to avoid direct glances at the sun or at people I know but don't really want to say hi to, and just generally being a college student when I had a flashback to Paris. In Paris, you don't look at anyone. Saying hi, even to someone you know, is rare because neither one of you is concentrated enough on examining the crowd to realize that someone is familiar. Or, really, you are too busy avoiding gazes from other people to realize that one of them is not just any "other" person. But then it dawned on me: this is all going to end, very soon.

In about a year's time, I'll be contemplating the fact that in two weeks I'll never be able to walk out of my dorm room and head to the library or the CoHo to study--I mean, why would I study anyway? In a year's time, the random encounters with friends sitting on lawns outside their houses will not happen: where I hope to go no one will even have a lawn or, if they do, they'd never sit outside and sunbathe on it. And, of course, in a year's time I will not be surrounded by overachievers, do-gooders, and extremely philosophical hippies, but rather by business people or tech geeks or maybe even your average joe. The real question, though, is how will the social scene work? How will I meet new people if I don't live with them? How will I find friends to go out to a bar with on a Friday night or to chat over coffees with in the middle of the afternoon? Most of all, how will I meet Mr. Right?

I kid somewhat on that last one, but it is a concern occasionally in my mind. I mean, in college you have your frat parties or your house events or your friends-of-friends who are people they lived with last year or had a class with this spring or were in X and Y organization with for the past 3 years. But in New York, in Paris, in LA, in Philadelphia, in Frankfurt...wherever, you don't have "classes" with people, and your housemates/roommates/neighbors aren't that likely to have lived with 40 other potential new friends last year. Maybe your co-workers are a good bet, but unless you work at a major organization with thousands of employees (not likely in my case), it's got to get boring hanging out with them and only them all the time. So what do you do on a Friday night? Is there anything good on TV?

So maybe I'm in the middle of another quarter-life crisis. Then again, college is all about facing one daunting task after another, at least in my experience. Moving on to regular life and navigating its lonely paths is probably the most daunting of them all. In the end, though, what better way to conclude your time in college than to suddenly lose all of the safety nets it had set up for you?

I'm game.