Micah Bhachech, Campus Carrier Opinions Editor

So, as you may have noticed, the semester is ending, and we are all careening inevitably toward finals. Seniors are going to graduate and go on to higher callings, but until then we are struggling to cross the same sea of coffee, over the oceans of our exams and essays, until at last we come shaken but safe to the far shore of summer.

Preliminarily, I want to quickly address readers unduly racked with anxiety. You can do it. You’ll get your stuff done and handle your business, and it’ll be beautiful when you lay yourself to sleep for the first time with finals behind you.

But while we work, it can become easy to invest ourselves so completely in our academic accomplishments that we fail to remember that we are humans who exist to do things other than pass classes. While we dive into books and slave over papers, burning our retinas with screens and filling our bellies with coffee, schoolwork can quickly become the source from which we derive our identity.

This warning may not be necessary or well timed since, of course, we have to put in some extra hours during finals week at the ends of the semesters. I do not want to encourage you to forsake that extra work; it is important, especially this time of year.

But even outside of the context of finals week, there seems to be a culture at Berry that bloats the importance of external, quantifiable accomplishments.

The next time you’re in the library, listen to the brief encounters as people greet each other in passing. Likely you will notice that the majority of those interactions are not moments of sharing relevant, enlightening, interesting parts of life. Rather, they are often soliloquies that can be summed up with something like, “Man. I am so busy. So inconceivably busy.” And to this the other party will likely respond with something like, “I’m busy too. I hold this position in that one organization, and I’m taking that one professor whose class keeps me still busier!”

I’m not communicating these particular observations of mine as if from a position of exemption. When I have to work hard, I want the world to know it and to praise me accordingly. (Coincidentally, I’ve been working really hard this semester.) I’m also not claiming to have identified a trend that is true of all Berry students.

However, I have talked with some friends who have noticed the same thing. We tend to focus so much on staying busy, on accomplishing academic and vocational feats, getting the right grades and the right jobs that we lose the time and energy to do anything else.

It’s not uncommon for me to feel a twinge of guilt for making time to be with a friend, hang out at Waffle House, play video games or read a book that I actually like. (Fun fact: that English major is really getting in the way of all the reading I want to do.)

But we can avoid the unhealthy stress that results from that kind of environment. It’s actually not that hard conceptually, though I won’t make that kind of claim about practicality. We just have to be a little kinder to ourselves when we commit ourselves. We have to remember that we are students, and we are working on generating résumés that will get us good jobs. We also have to remember that we are humans, and we need to hang out together and talk about stuff and take naps.

I may not be equipped to make a metaphysical claim about why we are on this planet, but I’m pretty sure that it is not so that we can get good grades and stay really busy until we’re out of time.