There’s a pretty famous story about Terence Tao, one of the greatest mathematicians of our time and winner of an International Math Olympiad Gold Medal at age 13, while he was pursuing graduate studies at Princeton. Rather than studying for Princeton’s infamously hard Ph.D. qualifying exams, he opted to surf the newfangled thing called the Internet, play video games, not do his homework, and basically not study until two weeks before the exams. In the end, he barely passed, but in the process, he got thoroughly grilled, gave pretty bad answers, and was reminded that he actually had to put effort into his studies.
This is a great parallel to senioritis: like Terence Tao, we believe we shall chart uncharted territory with our bold abandonment of effort in an attempt to find joy again. But this is all for naught, for we have become too institutionalized by a society that has locked joy in an unreachable void, using it as a hollow promise to trick us into working for a reward of joy it never intends to fulfill. Instead, what we find is that our attempt to escape this fool’s errand is met with immediate backlash. Society rages at the loss of a cog, one fueled by its own suffering, and unleashes all of its rage against this dissenter. This retaliation takes many forms, whether it’s forcing unfortunate graduate students to nearly fail their exams or triggering a grade drop that leaves the high school senior terrified of college rescissions.
Now, you may know me as a high school senior who is also experiencing senioritis. I confess that I may or may not have gotten a lower score than I would have liked on some of my recent exams because I have been studying less, and my procrastination has seen an uptick in the last few weeks. Given my own experiences with senioritis, you can trust me to provide some advice to tackle senioritis correctly.
First, even if we cannot truly break free from society’s chains in our search for real and unbounded joy, we must find a way to maximize the finite joy we can experience. To achieve this, I recommend doing things like hanging out with your friends. This might include, but is not limited to, bowling, playing cards, or hopping into a Minecraft server your friend dragged you into. When you’re not with your friends, you can consider the wonderful idea of scrolling reels for 5 hours straight, as I’ve heard that reels defy the law of diminishing marginal returns. However, remember that the goal of senioritising is being a bum, so I highly urge against anything productive, such as getting a j*b, tempting as it may be.
You can do all of these activities to enjoy your senioritis, but keep in mind that this bumness has its consequences. Society might retaliate against your opposition to productive work by trying to destroy your grade in such a way that you get below an A. If you don’t plan correctly, the institution will succeed in annihilating all of your hopes and dreams. If you plan your senioritis deliberately and correctly, you can calculate your grade to an exact percentage to have a precise quantification of how much bumness buffer you have. This way, when you inevitably feel too lazy to do your homework, you know exactly how much success you are sacrificing with your lazy behaviour. With all of that in mind, you are now prepared to make the most of your senioritis.
