K: If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

I don't like the fact that I'm taking extra time out of my day to write this. I expect this post to be a long ramble through a series of thoughts which have been sort of chaotically swirling around my head recently, and although it's possible that observing them and writing them down will collapse them, like a wavefunction, I don't really think it's likely.

I also don't like the fact that writing this feels like a waste of time. I'm writing this down to work through how I feel—that seems have some inherent value, beyond anything acquiring some additional points on a problem set or a final project could create. Besides, I'm going to pass these classes no matter what, right? Right?

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

If I'm not writing this for myself, then what am I doing it for? Some abstract audience?
If I'm not taking these classes for myself, then what am I doing it for? A 'P' somewhere on a transcript?

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

The semester is starting to wind down. We're approaching a point where I'm a quarter of the way through my MIT education. To be honest, this scares the hell out of me. I have definitely learned a lot of "academic content"—declarative facts and procedural approaches to problem-solving—but I don't feel like I haven't grown as a person. I haven't learned anything about "life", whatever that means.  Now something like 22.5% of my way through this experience which, in part, is supposed to prepare me to be a Real Human Person™, I still feel utterly lost. I don't have a job this summer. My plan for what is now the next three years is still infeasible and over-obsessed with academics, with no clear tangible ends.

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

I told myself at the beginning of the semester that I didn't have to answer all of these questions at once. I told myself that I should ask these questions to catch a glimpse at the big picture:

"What story do my classes this semester tell?"
"What is the success condition for this semester?"
"How will my trajectory change depending on the outcome of the semester?"

I told myself then that "my classes this semester are telling a story of me testing my limits. I'm reaching to the edge of my abilities and seeing what's there." That the success condition was obvious:

If I have learned new information about my interests and abilities, then the semester will have been a success. If I have to drop a class, then I know 69 units is too many units to take. If I struggle in 18.100B [Real Analysis], then I'll have learned that maybe pure math content isn't my forte. If I don't enjoy 21W.755/Reading and Writing Short Stories, then I'll know that perhaps writing classes are not for me. If everything goes perfectly, then maybe I'll attempt to take even more classes in the fall.

Even with such an abstract goal, I feel like I've failed. I know that 69 units is something I can handle, but I'm not sure what my margin to failure was. I didn't struggle in 18.100B, but it didn't come easily either. I enjoyed 21W.755, but I didn't love it. I don't think I've really found the spark that keeps me going. I can always scrape by, always do quite well, but I'm never in love with it. Never happy with the work itself.

Maybe that's overly pessimistic. After all, I said on the first day of classes that "the sheer joy of returning to classes has struck me in its proper form. It's the same feeling I had going from middle school to high school, a sense of sheer exaltation in the freedom and interest my classes this semester evoke, and the feeling I had felt I was lacking upon arriving at college." Maybe, at the time, I was just in love with the concept of taking interesting classes and getting work done, and that the joy quickly faded when the actual work came in. I can't tell, but at least part of the joy has ebbed, even if I do occasionally enjoy a class session here and there.

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

When considering my classes for this semester, I also guess that I considered this scenario: "It is, of course, possible that I end up with a somewhat useless set of information—that I enjoy taking all sorts of classes no matter the subject and that I can handle 69 units of classes without breaking a sweat (unlikely)." I hate my prescience. I would much rather have dropped a class this semester and figured out how I felt about that than to know that I have the capacity to operate at this level. I would much rather have fallen in love with at least one of my classes so that I could declare a major without this continued illusion that I am capable of doing and interested in everything. Why does my current Courseroad contain two majors and two minors? Why do I have three of them?

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

my current sophomore fall courseroad

I'm still doing this. Still asking myself to do the impossible, to be the kid who does everything. Why? I'm still stuck in a broken mentality; still stuck in my shitty high school self who was so bored of everything and everyone around him that he drowned himself in activities and competitions and random online courses because at least it was something to do until all of the rest of it disappeared; still stuck in the past, still stuck in grades as validation for doing something right. Every goddamn trophy and medal sitting on the desk in the downstairs corner. Surely, something went right to produce that, right?

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

I'm doing this because it feels like it's easier this way. The familiar is so easy to cling to, and even after having found so many new friends and new experiences at MIT, I'm still clinging to that familiar attitude. Now that I'm home, I'm clinging even harder to vestiges of a past that doesn't miss me at all. I'm taking classes because they might be interesting and useful for the future, but even more because they fit the requirements. I feel incapable of letting go of this dream.

I have data to justify my every action and decision. Time-tracking data from portions of fall and spring semester agree to within 0.01 hours—an average of 53.3 hours per week is the maximum I can do. They also agree to within less than one percent that I complete homework about 2.2 times faster than the hours from class evaluations. With that data, I can confidently say that by doing only the activities which I've been committed to from the start, I can fit within that cap. With some fudging, perhaps I could do even better. It'll be tight, but I can fit it in, and if not I'll drop 18.03.

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

There's a line in an AJR song that one of my friends was listening to that goes "you're working so damn hard, you forgot what you like." I kind of feel like that right now. There's a set of feelings here that's intertwined and really hard to untangle, but the individual threads go something like this:

• I'm not really working that hard—I'm surviving fine, and I have plenty of time, especially right now, to throw away a day or two a week to an activity or something I enjoy.
• All of this is a symptom of the quarantine, and if I was still on campus I would probably be happy and totally excited for classes and to be working through everything.
• Suffering is part of life—if there's no struggle, then why is the reward worth getting?
• I am still so lucky to be alive, to be safe, to be in a home where my parents love me and provide me with more than enough sustenance to keep me alive. I ought to make the most of it; I ought to pass it on.

I think I believe all of these statements in separate states of mind, but they are pretty incompatible with each other, and a cursory glance allows me to offer critiques of each of them: the first sounds suspiciously like a form of impostor syndrome; the second is just blatantly false and I've definitely felt horrible on campus before, although perhaps not as often as I do now—the data support this claim; the third is just a thinly veiled starving artist trope. The last seems to be the most convincing, but that doesn't surprise me, having discussed it plenty of times on this blog. The constant discussion of Bao expresses its familial sense. A post from September 27th (a day, it turns out, where basically everything happened) echoes this:

This was also, to some extent, something I talked to my friend about today. I think being selfish in some cases is good and important, because it prevent us from destroying ourselves and our mental health. At the same time, having the privilege and ability to change things and participate in things which may be more sacrificial is useless if we don't actually do things which can change the people around us. 'You don't have to save the world,' he says. Part of me agrees with this. Part of me wonders if I'm not trying my best.

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

And so we return to the conundrum. The only convincing answer I have ever had for this question is "other people." Two winters ago, when one of my friends got into Harvard, I wrote something which, over a year later, I still feel is the only core, settled tenet of my life's philosophy:

We are not ourselves in a vacuum, but rather we have been keenly shaped by the people around us, and that process not only means that ultimately we are not solely responsible for our success (which is actually relatively self-evident, although some people do forget it) but also that we are responsible for the success of others, and to be little, positive parts of other people's stories is perhaps the best we can hope to be, as we ourselves travel through life.

I mean, I felt good being engaged in CPW, doing everything I could to welcome the prefrosh. I feel good checking in on people I haven't talked to in a while. I'm not convinced I'm sticking to this is as much as I could be—I'm not convinced that I would drop everything for an acquaintance in trouble when I feel like I should be, and I lapse into myopic self-obsession more than I would like to admit. I don't really understand how everything I'm doing really fits this philosophy either; some abstract idea of knowing things which might help me in the future to be more effective in somehow pursuing whatever goal I end up wanting to accomplish. I don't understand how what I feel like I should be doing class-wise relates to anything else which feels like it should be more real or on a different level from pure academics. It's easier than trying to find something else though. It truly is.

If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for?

There's no complete way to end this blog. I haven't figured out the answer to the question. I needed to write this down though, and I suppose I accomplished this. Now, for an exhale, and a return to the firehose which guides my everyday.