Chapter 39

I had a whole chapter in the past that went through how I yearned for freedom and independence while I was in highschool. I wanted to have the least amount of dependence on mom. She wasn’t a really stable bedrock after all and I needed to be my own person so as to not have to rely on her. This idea of independence kind of came to its own sort of fruition towards the end of highschool. My mom and I did things separately and took care of our own responsibilities. She never had to nag me to do my studies nor study hard for exams and I never had to tell her to do her job so that we can have a roof over our heads. 

What this meant was that I was very used to being on my own and managing my own responsibilities. Aside from the cooking and cleaning I mentioned in the last chapter, studying and going about learning in my classes didn’t feel any different from my highschool at all. While on occasion I would divulge myself a little by staying up way too late and procrastinating for an assignment or two, I never truly got out of control from myself and ignored my studies nor my mental and physical health completely. I was already used to freedom and had no need to indulge in any self destructive behavior simply because now I can. 

Was I alone in this responsible type of lifestyle? Not at all. I think it felt like that at times simply because the lifestyle itself is kind of isolating and boring but if I had to estimate how many students were like me out there? I would say we would’ve been a silent majority at around 70% boring and 30% not. Waterloo University wasn’t a party school like our brethren from across the street at Laurier and most of our students were pretty responsible from my experience. That is to say, most of the students at Waterloo were very boring when it came to their social lives.

It was a peaceful life and a sustainable one. But that 30%? That’s still a pretty large number.

Out of those who discovered this freedom to party as much as possible, some of them would party and drink but didn’t know how to do it responsibly. Others were youths who had been repressed so much by their parents that any taste of freedom became instantly intoxicating to them. These people are the ones who lost control from simply being given the freedom and responsibility that came with independence from your family.

This is the dangerous side of freedom. These freshmen were now free to use their time to do whatever they wanted and more importantly, they got to reorganize their own value systems. We could now decide not just what to do but what you value doing. Outside of just deciding whether you can go to a club or go clubbing, you can decide if that was something you liked doing or not. Assuming you have the will to control your impulses, we were now suddenly given the key to our own desires. 

You may have so far only read this entire blog from the perspective of a science student but might I remind you, there’s other faculties out there! For some majors, GPA wasn’t even that important. You could easily decide that schooling would not be that high on your priority list and dedicate more time to something else like networking or getting a part time job. The point I’m making here? It was time to do some inventory on my value systems. 

This was not really a negotiation of any sort. I needed to do this. My anxiety wouldn’t let me take a semester just on a whim. My courses were a whole separate set of organization that I needed to do but they were always within the confines of school. That was just one category of things going on in my life and I had more than a few categories to think about. In the end, I came to see my own tier list of values as such.

A Tier Values	GPA: Needed to get into Optometry School
B Tier Values	Volunteering: Need to get into Optometry School Classical Music (Orchestra): For just my sanity
C Tier Values	Social: Didn’t enjoy it but the fear of missing out (FOMO) was a very strong force that was often hard to resist
D Tier Values	Breakdancing: For fun. Did not help with my future at all. There wasn’t a lot of reasons to do it.
E Tier Values	Singing: I was a part of choir before and while it was fun, I wasn’t really that attached
F Tier Values	Swimming: Lifeguarding as a part time job was nice in highschool but now that I was in University, there was simply not enough time to keep my certifications up to date.

One thing a lot of people tend not to think about is how our interests change when we start living alone. Even if you had parents who were super supportive of everything you did, you probably were influenced at least a little from their likes, dislikes, living conditions and values. When you first live by yourself or with your roommates in university, suddenly all that is gone. Very quickly you may find that when left to your own devices, you may not actually like some of the things you did previously. 

Another thing to consider is that when you move to university, for a majority of people this is the freshest new start you would have gotten in a while. While it was tempting to remarket myself as someone else, if you look at the tier list I put up you’ll find that what I was going for was a complete replication of my highschool life. This will change pretty drastically in the coming months. This is also a common theme. I think most freshmen keep all their values the same initially and then find them to change in just the upcoming months. It is important to acknowledge that there may be a lack of change initially due to a hesitation towards using your new found freedom or the whole keeping with your habits because it’s just a familiar thing. Beyond that though, I believe there’s two deeper themes at play. These two new themes are pretty common once you see them and I, for one, would find that they recur again and again in my life even years later. 

The first is the sunk cost fallacy. This is a pretty common fallacy of thought. It goes something like this. I have already spent so much time into this one thing, if I stop now, it would’ve been all for naught. For me, this was definitely the case with classical music. Due to the constant pestering about my fees for lessons by mom, I knew that I had already spent a huge amount of money and also time perfecting this craft. I couldn’t throw that away now. Even now, as I study towards a major that has nothing to do with classical music, I still feel like I should keep the classical music thing going because it would simply be such a huge waste otherwise. I did like classical music, but I would be lying if I told you that classical music was so high on my tier list simply because I liked it. 

The second is the overlap of things you like and the things you’re good at. In this we also need to talk about what “good” really means. I found out that there was a difference between the things you wanted to do and the things you were just naturally good at a while ago with breakdancing. I had learned the handstand quite easily throughout a few months but hadn’t been able to learn how to “style” for the longest time. Looking back now, I found that a lot of the moves that I carried forward are more related to the handstand than the “style” thing I was trying to learn. The reason? I liked the things I was excelling at more than the things I wasn’t. 

This is a pretty common theme. If you’re good at something, you tend to like it more. When you like it more, you tend to get better at it.  Rarely does something you absolutely dominate get completely forgotten in the recesses of your mind. Oftentimes, if you’re good at something and keep at it, you improve more and therefore like it more, creating a positive feedback loop. When we apply this concept to skills or hobbies, the natural outcome is that you find your life and free time progressively more and more enveloped by the skill or hobby at hand. 

What I’m getting at is, aside from the obvious reason why classical music was higher on the tier list because I was good at it, we can now also explain why breakdancing, singing and swimming were so low on the list. I wasn’t that great at them. At best I was mediocre and to be honest, I was okay with that. The thing is though, being mediocre at something meant that I only tried at them or valued those skills or hobbies at a mediocre level. By extension, being mediocre also meant that I only liked to do those hobbies at a mediocre level of interest. 

As first year university officially started, you can guess which hobbies I cut first. 

Or at least so you would’ve thought. 

What actually happened was…

I cut classical music completely and bumped up breakdancing by two tier levels.