I shouldn’t be the first to tell you that high schoolers are stressed out of their minds.

It’s expected of us that 95% of our time should be spent studying, doing homework, and applying for college. Our culture has it ingrained in our heads that the slightest drop in motivation or performance will drag us down forever; that if we aren’t trying our absolute best all the time, the world’s going to move on without us and we won’t catch up; that if we’re not successful, it’s because we’re not trying hard enough.

Within all these expectations, what about our personal interests? What about the things we do for fun?

That’s what the other 5% of our time is for, but don’t you worry, our culture’s got a hold of that, too. Even in the solace of our passions and pastimes, we’re expected to be always improving so we can be the best artist, the best athlete, the best musician. Then, we neatly file all our fun activities that we’ve put our blood, sweat, and tears into, and we send them to colleges in hopes that they’ll see that we are the best. If we aren’t, then what was all that trouble for?

It seems rare to me that anyone ever does anything simply because they enjoy it. Everything is meant to go towards a greater effort, and if not, there’s seemingly no purpose in doing it. Our society wants us to believe that all of our time needs to be productive; therefore even our free time needs to be productive, too. We expect that all this hard work will produce a personal utopia in the long run, but we can get so caught up in this process that we can forget to enjoy ourselves in the present.

We should try to be easier on ourselves and do more things that we really enjoy. To quote the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Hard work is important, but what use is it if you’re not doing something you want to do? If there’s something you are passionate about, go after it. Make sure you’re doing things that you love, even if you’re not good at them. If we aren’t, we’re missing out on the positive effect it could have on us.