This Is The Best It Gets

Why are we already mourning the present?

With dissertation season upon us, the academic year is beginning to draw to a close. Candlemas is always bittersweet: there’s the good weather and the brighter days, but there’s also the long summer break looming in the distance. It’s a time of goodbyes and promising long-distance friends that you two will FaceTime at the closest opportunity. Every year until now, however, I’ve always thought of the return in September as inevitable. September is when everything goes back to normal, everyone comes back, the same good memories are had, and the thought of graduation is a distant, almost hypothetical one.

Uni always seemed never-ending — as a fresher, four years felt like I had my whole life to live before graduating. Now that I’m over the safety net of the halfway line, I couldn’t be more aware of how finite it all is. This academic year in particular, I have become suddenly aware of the expiration date that creeps closer and closer. And yet, it’s not even my last year. Third year has been full of “this time next year…” thoughts. “This time next year, it’ll be our last Christmas ball,” or, “This time next year, it’ll be our last May Dip.” For some reason, the focus always goes to the “last” part of that thought, rather than the bit about it being “next year.” Because of this, I feel like my friends and I have already mourned our time at university. The cliché words of wisdom to “live in the moment” and, specific to uni, cherish every second of it as it will, apparently, be the highlight of your life, are to blame for this grief.

University is painted out to be your fantastical ‘glory days,’ and in many ways, it has a right to be. It’s a unique community setting with a concentrated potential for socialising and learning, an environment that doesn’t really occur anywhere else. Even before you go to uni, you hear tall tales from middle-aged adults reminiscing about their wild and wacky days of freedom before the old 9-to-5 kicked in. If this is the best it gets before the rest of our miserable lives, we need to hold onto it as best we can. 

Somewhere, the cherishing becomes grieving. We mourn when we think of moving away from friends, of never being silly uni students again, but most importantly, of not knowing what comes next. In my mind, education has always had the simple three-act structure: Primary School, Secondary School, then University. There is no next act; everything seemingly falls away afterwards. What comes next is termed Adulthood. This used to make sense; I remember finding photos of my parents’ graduations and thinking they looked so grown up. It’s weird now, realising they were so young. I think about the stories they’d tell me growing up, and the uncomfortable realisation dawning on me that they’d have been two years younger than I am now in some of them.

As with most youth-focused life experiences, university is made to look like a golden age because of the expectations around how certain age groups should act. The association between youth and freedom is just as often untrue as any other stereotype, such as old people being boring. It’s not necessarily the uni years that so many look back fondly on, it’s the unique social atmosphere that’s only available to teenagers and young adults. Even in our digital age, with almost every person and community within reach at the click of a button, there is a distinct lack of environments in which to make friends when you are older. I think the only way I’d be able to live in the moment next year, without continuously being sad about its ending, is if the pressure of having the rest of the fun you are ever going to have for the rest of your life, ever, is taken away by enabling adults to have fun. Who knows, those future glory days of adulthood could even be better than those from uni; there’d at least be no coursework or exams to worry about. 

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons