Satisfication

This past week was the week my semester began. You know, the holy-shit-I-have-two-papers-and-a-quiz week when, no matter how interesting that class sounded, you wish you had taken 12 credit hours.

It always happens like this, and like a mother after childbirth, I always forget how difficult it is and sign up for more.

Here I am yet again at week six, scratching my head as to how I got nickeled and dimed out of my relaxing spring semester.

I know I can’t be the only one. I’ve seen you all at the Wells Library late at night. I’ve watched you frantically trying to print that paper in Ballantine. We are many, the overextended. We serve you your coffee at Starbucks, we flier for your call-out meetings and we stay up till odd hours finishing your term papers.

When I was little and my bookmobile projects were too ambitious or I had suddenly taken an interest in seven new sports, my dad would look at me and say, “Remember to KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.”

I am officially stupid.

But I’m not sure that I can take all the rap here. Don’t employers and law school admissions boards beg to differ with KISS? Isn’t it for them that we splice three minors and seven extracurricular activities into our already busy lives? Isn’t it for some unnamed review board off in the distance that we stay out late and get up early, nurturing caffeine addictions and becoming adrenaline junkies along the way?

Even if Dad was right, who among us is prepared to say “no” to that excellent opportunity because it violates the four-letter dedication to simplicity?

The great tragedy here is that for all this doing, I feel like I’m giving little and getting less. In order to make my busy world turn I find myself asking, “What is the least I can do and still do well on this assignment?” What a horrible way to live. I don’t want to go through life only paying off the principle, only giving the bare minimum, always skimming the surface.

Last week my political science teacher said critics often deny that people make rational decisions because they engage in satisficing – that is, choosing not the best solution, but one that suffices to satisfy minimal requirements.

But I can’t help but wonder what sort of lives all of us overextended satisficers are setting ourselves up for. Am I going to wake up one day to discover that I’ve fulfilled all of the requirements for my seven majors and my dream job, only to find that on the inside it feels hollow and inch-deep?

Gandhi criticized the modern world because of its “mindless activism” and its idea that unless someone is always moving he or she is not alive. I, like Gandhi, reject that idea, but I still find myself rushing to classes and packing in too many clubs and call-out meetings.

This is the great challenge of modern life: to transcend the hustle and bustle of living in order to find the life in it.