The Summer I Didn’t Do Enough

Checking the LinkedIn profiles of students from an engineering college is not for the weak. 

Usually, bouts of unproductivity coupled with a severe lack of wanting to do anything at all made for a glorious start to the summer break. Of course that wasn’t what the initial plan had looked like. According to the piece of paper pinned onto the wall, I was supposed to have made some headway through my very ‘packed and productive’ schedule. Going online and finally checking all my text notifications was the start of a very dizzying and never-ending spiral—like the ones that are black and white and make you see patterns with your eyes closed. 

Suddenly, I was left playing my least favourite game: catch-up.

I now needed to feel like every waking hour was spent furthering my position in this never-ending rat—résumé—race.

I started to sit staring at my laptop for hours, letting the timer I’d set run just so I could feel like I was putting in the time to be better because with each passing day my best was not the best I could give. 

A continuous stream of “But aren’t you on vacation?” kept running through my mind. 

Balance, it’s all about balance—I’d tell myself every day. Why then did I feel such crushing guilt whenever I took time off? I could’ve been doing something, anything in that afternoon spent watching trash tv. My college social circles were full of people posting about things they’d finished and here I was whiling away my time off. 

How could I justify any break I took when I constantly felt like I was falling behind? 

I’d envisioned summer to be like those moments in a car when it’s raining outside and there’s nothing to do except wait in traffic and race raindrops. A vacation full of boardgame nights and too many movies watched. Café hopping and hours spent roaming aimlessly in air-conditioned malls with friends. But somehow these kinds of breaks became few and far between as summer went on. Breaks no longer meant inactivity, they needed to have telos. Rest was allowed, if only to passively better myself somehow. Leisure without justification was now the most stressful part of my day.

Imagine Sisyphus, damned to the eternal misery of having to push the boulder up the hill only for it to roll back down no matter how hard he tries. Now, suppose he takes a moment to pause—to catch his breath midway up the hill.

Is the break Sisyphus takes standing on the hill with the burden of the boulder on his shoulders a break at all?

Denying oneself time off before the completion of a task seems to be the modern human predicament. 

It’s like someone standing at the deep end of the swimming pool, asking you to reach them, so you can finally stop swimming, but the closer you get the more they move away. When is it okay to stop and allow ourselves to breathe?

The philosophy of free time is one that must be studied again. There seems to exist this rigged chore wheel that keeps spinning and never lands on recess. To some extent we’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t deserve downtime unless we’ve finished our goals for the day. We’ve begun to let unfinished work contaminate the mindless joy of an afternoon nap. 

It’s a strange sort of feeling to wait for the semester to end to experience agenda-less days only for the days to seem like a colossal waste of time. To see all those days—spent convincing yourself that the time off was needed—amount to just time lost in pursuit of useless endeavours like joy.

So, I sit here wondering how many of us have lost the art of leisure. Constantly measuring ourselves against a wooden ruler that works for some but not others. Partaking in guilt-free time off seems like an impossible task. That word again—task. How hard can it be to do nothing? (very much, apparently).