

Do I have to float through life? - thecombjelly
http://thintz.com/essays/float-through-life

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nostrademons
This is basically why I wanted to drop out through most of college. I _wanted_
the challenge, I wanted to make things difficult for myself, because I
certainly hadn't been challenged until then.

I realized halfway through senior year, when it was nearly too late, that I
was being silly. Mostly because I finally realized how hard what I wanted to
accomplish in life _actually_ was, and figured that if it's intrinsically that
hard, why make it even more difficult on myself? I can challenge myself by
working on harder problems, not by throwing up artificial roadblocks in my
way.

The way I _wished_ I'd approached college was to treat it as a menu of
opportunities, each of which I could sample or gorge myself upon as I saw fit.
I did this to some extent, but there's so much more I could've exposed myself
to had I made different choices back in high school. Unfortunately, it's
difficult to understand just how big the world is and how much richness is out
there when you've spent the first 18 years of your life in an
institutionalized box with your parents making every decision for you.

