There’s a saying that goes around that states: When you’re young you don’t have the money to do anything and when you’re an adult you don’t have the time to do anything and when you’re older you don’t have the energy to do anything. It’s a cycle we don’t entirely believe is true until it’s too late.
As college students, we all have hundreds of dreams to do when we’re older. We dream of travelling the globe, skydiving, adventuring, buy a big house, and many other dreams. We all have dreams that when we get money we’re going to finally get to do what we want. We’ll finally have the chance to do everything we want, but will we. We keep pushing all our dreams to the side because we think we’ll get to them eventually.
We won’t ever get to do what we want as we get older. Pushing our desires away just becomes a habit and we continue to push more and more goals away. Each morning I commute to my internship, I watch the business adults in their commute to work. They follow the same pattern every day. They all commute to work for about an hour and walk through the revolving doors into their gleaming office buildings to sit in an office for 8 hours every day to take another hour to get back home. They all probably follow the same mundane tasks every day: eat, wash, sleep, repeat. They may have weekends off but they spend it sleeping in, cleaning, or trying to spend time with their kids. It’s the same pattern every single day and people repeat the same things, the same interactions with the same people. It’s a miserable life that adults live. It’s something we all will do.
We all think we won’t turn into corporate zombies like that fish from the Spongebob episode but it’s more likely than we think.
We’ll all be exhausted after work like the people I see on the train every day. Instead of going to bed at 2 a.m., we’ll sleep at 10 p.m. and wake up at 5 a.m. None of us want to live that life.
When opportunity strikes, we should take it. We should all take those opportunities that pass us by. When there’s a class that goes to Greece and you can take it take it. Save up for that trip. Go on a road trip with friends and live out of a car for a month. Those are the moments you’ll remember for years to come. You’ll remember the trips you went on and learn how to budget trips yourself so you can go on more. If you can plan a trip on next to nothing and be exhausted from cheap late night flights just to see the world then you’ll be able to travel when you’re older. You can buy the things you want when you see it. You only live once so why not indulge yourself every so often instead of saving up so much money and time and energy when it doesn’t work that way. You’ll save thousands of dollars that will end up to no use because you’ll have died before you spent it. You’ll waste your energy on working overtime hours because you have to. You’ll never have the time to do what you want because something will keep popping up. Just go ahead and do it. Don’t care what people think. Go to college if you can’t afford it. Go to Europe if you really want to. It’s your life and you should live it how you want. Only you know what you can and can’t do it and if you know it’s possible then go ahead and do it.
