I am a self-assumed, out of the closet, overthinker. And my most recent overthinking journey has been over whether its actually possible to live with no problems. I thought about this in two ways:

First, the fact that we measure a lot of things relatively. For instance, I am from Brazil, a warm, tropical country where there never is any snow, and I go to school in Atlanta. I think Atlanta is really cold, whereas my friends from the northern US walk around in december as if it was fall. Their definition of cold is different from mine, because we compare the cold we feel in Atlanta to the cold we felt at home. Or for those of you who went through a Vampire Diaries phase, who remembers how Stefan used to be considered tall when he was born in Renaissance Italy but in present day US he was average height?

Secondly, I engaged in some non-psychologically recommended self reflection and autoanalysis (kids, don't try this at home). Whenever I don't have a major problem in my life, something as small as a midterm can really throw me, whereas if I do have something bigger going on that same midterm might not give me enough stress.

I have always hated the saying "we need the lows to feel the highs" and "it needs to rain for you to get a rainbow" and "bad things have silver linings", as I thought these were just cheap ways to make you feel better for having a problem, cheap and useless optimism, something a somewhat pessimistic and overly rational person like myself, absolutely hates. ut now, I am starting to think these sayings are getting at something. And if all of this is true, it may be the explanation for why some people are so shallow - they just haven't been through enough to know what a real problem is, and so can't really appreciate not having problems but rather make up problems out of nothing.

I hate pointing out issues and not being able to provide a solution, but it seems way too glum to conclude that if you are making a non important something into a huge deal, go find yourself a bigger problem. The most useful thing I think can be concluded from this reflection, is that boredom causes people to complicate simple things. Even if you have not been through real bad things in life, if you are busy with something important, or at the very least are aware of the bigger problems that exist (such as world famine, orphaned children, homeless people and the likes) you won't waste your time rambling on about how you gained a few extra pounds, or how your GPA dropped to a 3.80 (yes, I really did hear someone complain about this), or how the Rider app for Emory shuttles is never on time, or how the DUC chicken is so dry.

If you are stressed about a midterm, go do some volunteer work instead of scrolling through instagram in stacks. Make it so you don't have enough time to study, so that when you actually sit down to do it its a study or fail type of scenario. Go make a difference somewhere, the time to be idealistic and work for free for the good of others is now, in our naive, parent or financial aid sponsored college years.