The rumors about junior year are true: The impending stress of college applications, the late nights and groggy mornings, and the horrors of Chemistry labs. But my hours of contemplation have also helped me realize a seemingly obvious truth: It doesn’t have to be this way.
As a freshman still scrambling to find my place in high school, the pressure seemed to encompass me all at once when I entered Lakeside’s upper school campus. College loomed over me wherever I went. Gone were my middle school days, full of flexibility and fun and floundering between extracurriculars to figure out what I wanted to do. This was where it got serious.
Many juniors, particularly those at Lakeside, are victims of what one of my friends calls the “college haze.” Like fog, the craze to push for every internship, grab every leadership position, and maximize academic stats looms over us wherever we go. It clouded my vision so subtly I almost didn’t notice, limiting my ability to see clearly, focusing only on what was right in front of me: each day was another chance to improve my college application.
There’s a concept in psychoanalysis of “the lack,” developed by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, building off of Sigmund Freud. From the moment we’re born, Lacan posits, we lack a certain sense of wholeness. We spend the rest of our lives trying to chase fulfillment, attempting to fill this lack. This process is known as the “death drive.”
The catch, though, is that our lack can never be filled. Lacan argues that our desires are not a reflection of our actual want to achieve a goal, but of the wanting itself. In other words, we are destined to chase goals that are fundamentally unattainable. We are stuck in a paradoxical loop of wanting the feeling of desire itself. More importantly, achieving a goal we’re striving for doesn’t satiate our desire, but simply shifts it toward another goal.
If you’ve heard of me, you might know that I love debate. I miss crew practice to attend tournaments each weekend, I spend lunchtime writing new arguments, and I show up to my classes on three hours of sleep because I stayed up the night reading through and compiling pages of research.
For the first few months of sophomore year, this was true: I focused on little else but debate. At the beginning of the year, I was determined to qualify for the Tournament of Champions, the national championship for speech and debate. But by my third tournament, I hadn’t qualified, and my initial determination had turned to desperation. I set a countdown on my phone to each tournament, filled my phone homescreen with motivational quotes, and woke up each morning hating that I hadn’t qualified. Each time something bad happened in my life, I thought to myself, If only I was qualified for the TOC, it would be okay.
If you only have one goal, then your mood – your life – will be polarized, dependent only on a single factor. I could qualify, or I could not. I could succeed, or I could fail and fall into a spiral of self-doubt. If I won, then all my work would be worth it; if I lost, then I might as well not have bothered.
Four months into the season, I won the fourth qualifying round I’d been in that year after three devastating losses. I expected to revel in euphoria and an invincible feeling of accomplishment. But I wasn’t happy, and I couldn’t figure out why. Instead, I felt a sense of emptiness. Who was I without being defined by my constant drive to qualify for the TOC?
After filling what we think is the lack, there’s often a sense of loss. When we build our lives around reaching a goal, when we’ve defined our very identities around that goal, we find ourselves with no sense of purpose after succeeding.
Qualifying for the TOC had been my lack. So was going to a “prestigious” college. And the more I tried to chase these goals, the more I fell into the exact death drive Lacan had described.
I learned about psychoanalysis early last year. The part I couldn’t grapple with, though, was a panic of becoming complacent. This year, I went through a period where I was constantly told – by the rational part of my brain, as well as my peers and mentors – that I should stop defining myself by results.
In the middle of my junior year, when the panic of college applications felt like it reached its peak, I decided to make a change. I drilled the advice to “just forget the results” into my mind every day, hoping it would put a stop to my stress.
My problem then, though, was that I overcorrected; I went too far in the other direction. I stopped caring about results entirely, and instead found myself demotivated and demobilized. The raw motivation I had fueled myself by had been unhealthy because it had been the only thing I cared about, but it did have its merits in helping me past hardships in the process. It reminded me why what I was doing mattered, because motivation is not black and white. Sometimes, we are doing it for the long haul. We might not love the long hours of grueling training or arduous workouts, even if we love the feeling of running a marathon. And grinding worksheet after worksheet to pass a test the next day, rather than for a pure love of chemistry, is normal.
How, then, do we rectify our innate psychoanalytical drive to chase unattainable goals with the undeniable benefits of that motivation?
Here’s the middle ground I settled on: We can balance being motivated by results, but define ourselves by the effort we put in in the process.
This distinction is particularly important, because it naturally lends to intrinsic confidence. There’s a quote I saw online that resonated with me: “What we give isn’t always what we return, but what we give is what we are.” When we know we put in the work, when we know we did everything we possibly could to achieve a goal, we will leave with nothing to lose regardless of the results. We can try our best to reach a certain goal, and motivate ourselves by wanting to reach it, while recognizing certain factors are out of our control too. It’s perfectly normal to be upset at falling short of a goal we truly wanted to reach, but the important part is that if we put in our best in the process, we will be able to accept any result and move on knowing we did our best.
Importantly, Lacan did not believe that the “lack” was a problem to be solved. Rather, it was a method to mobilize ambition. A perfectly satisfied person would have no reason to create art, pursue goals, or connect with others. The lack keeps us moving.
Hopefully, this mindset helps lift the college haze (or whatever future-oriented goal is clouding your vision) and helps you see a little more clearly into the distance. Everything you do should be for a purpose, but in a different sense than my freshman self thought. Everything you do should either be for short-term joy, long-term fulfillment, or both. Hanging out with friends is both: It brings you happiness in the moment, and surrounding yourself with people you love has intrinsic value in life long-term, too.
Like any other life change, internalizing this kind of mindset in a society that constantly emphasizes results is a journey. These changes don’t happen overnight. To start, I suggest asking yourself: What really matters to you? What kind of person do you want to be, and what kind of life do you want to live?
