One of my favorite days of the year — besides the usual suspects like Christmas, Thanksgiving or my birthday — is when the clocks “fall back” for daylight saving time. I never remember that it’s coming, but therein lies the magic: It’s a surprise gift of time.
As a kid, my affinity for this day was solely based on getting an extra hour of sleep. While I still love the prospect of getting some extra shut-eye — which I need now more than ever as a college student — I find more joy in another version of the same sentiment: Instead of gaining another hour of sleep, I simply love gaining another hour.
Even though it’s only an hour, I treat it like a gift I always want. Every day, I waste time scrolling on my phone, doing nothing to stop myself and still lamenting about the time I lost. I always wish I had more time, yet I continually throw away what I have.
We live in a world where we “kill time” between tasks, robbing ourselves of something we will never get more of. In doing this, we limit our potential, taking away time that could be spent learning or creating, and replacing it with nothing remotely productive.
Even when I’m doing something constructive with my time, I find myself increasingly plagued by the notion of “time well spent.” As a first-year student, my notion of spending my time “well” is doing schoolwork. After all, I’m here to succeed in school and set myself up for success in the future. Why wouldn’t this be the best way to invest my time?
Like many of my peers at Georgetown University, I spent most of my time in high school studying for good grades or pursuing resume-building extracurricular activities. In exchange, I missed out on time with my family and friends — and neglected to be a good son, brother and friend in the process. I spent so much of my time working just to get into Georgetown, so not spending my time in pursuit of success here would discredit all that I have sacrificed.
After having spent nearly three months away from home, and now that I’m rapidly approaching the first time I get to see my family since arriving here, I’ve realized that the time I spend with the people I love is more important than any time I spend on a series of trivial homework assignments. The grades come and go — the time spent on each amounting only to the feeling of completing another task — but my loved ones don’t. The time spent working does not fill me with joy, fulfillment or lasting memories like the time I spend with my family.
Even if the time I spend studying, doing homework or completing any other task that makes me think I’m taking my place at a prestigious academic institution seriously does result in good grades or an impressive internship, none of it will matter if it comes at the cost of my personal relationships. As much as I tell myself I don’t have the time to call my mom or text my brothers back home, I realize that the relationships outside of my schoolwork are the most important investments for my time.
At the end of the day, some of the biggest parts of our identities are defined by our relationships with one another, so the time we allocate for them should reflect that. My identity as a Georgetown student with a specific GPA and certain extracurriculars is a clear afterthought in comparison to the roles I play with the people I love.
So, take time out of your day — whether it was going to be wasted scrolling on Instagram or used to start a paper — to call your parents, siblings or anyone else in your life. Just like how the end of daylight saving gives us the gift of an hour, you can give someone the gift of your precious and limited time. It’ll mean more than any letter grade or GPA ever could.
Today, the fairy tale we tell is that we’re okay spending all our time in Lauinger Library study rooms or in our beds scrolling on TikTok — but that’s not how to live happily ever after.
Dylan Goral is a first-year in the College of Arts & Sciences. This is the fifth installment of his column, “The Fairy Tales We Tell.”
