The quarter is wrapping up quickly, and in between back-to-back midterms, endless piles of laundry and chores, phone calls, birthdays, and common colds, we’re all gasping for a second to breathe. As a first-year student at UCI, I knew the quarter system would be a big adjustment from the comfortable semester system of my high school, but I failed to anticipate how quickly it would feel. It’s not just the fact that it’s barely 2 months that makes it fly by, but the fact that the happier I am, the quicker it goes. It feels unfair. 4 years seems like so much time, yet it’s hardly any time at all, and even if you do believe it when adults tell you how fast it goes (which nobody ever does), what are you supposed to do about it? I feel like, even though I’ve barely started, I can already see the end. Thrown into the pile of readings and exams and responsibilities, fun things tend to get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list to collect cobwebs, but before you know it, Pomp and Circumstance is playing and you’re already out of time. Making the most of your youth while also just getting through your to-do list every day is a lot of pressure, and we’re already stressed out enough.
In the first quarter, my solution to this problem was to have no fun. It seems silly, but I mean it. I stretched out every day for as long as I could by spending hours doing my work in the library, getting all my responsibilities over and done with as soon as possible, even though I had nowhere to be. I wanted to work hard and play harder, but as soon as that work was done, all I could do was sleep.
It’s not sustainable for any of us to condense all the pressure into one day so we can have fun the next, believing that nine hours of sleep on Friday night can help us recover from four hours over the past week. Even though I might have to disperse my work throughout the day, and I have less of those trippy moments of walking out of the library after walking in at 1 PM to see that the sun has set completely and it’s nearly time for bed, I get to stop and smell the roses once in a while instead of whizzing past them, believing that they’ll be there when I’m done. None of us can stop time and our prime college years from slipping through our fingers, and we shouldn’t. What we can do, though, is try to make every second count. That doesn’t mean being productive 24/7, but the exact opposite. Allowing ourselves to slow down and be in the present.
However, this is much easier said than done, especially now, when there’s a monster that feeds on time lurking in the corner of all of our lives.
The average person spends 5 hours and 16 minutes on their phone per day. That’s over 1 full day, unpaused, of screen time per week. For me, most of my screen time comes from the minutes spent waiting around, whether that be for class or bed or for a meeting to start. It’s the result of being just a few minutes ahead of my schedule, but not early enough to settle into anything substantial. I don’t have time for something else, so I’ll hop on my phone and check my texts or look at Instagram, but part of the reason I feel like I have no time is because of my phone.
A 50-minute lecture has me counting down the seconds, but it feels like I’ll scroll on my phone before I take a shower or right after I get home and all of a sudden half an hour has passed. If I can dedicate 5 hours a day to my phone, imagine if we dedicated even half of that to something else?
I ask how we can make time move slower but, unfortunately, I don’t have the answer. In the spiral of instability, time is the only constant. It will exist when the sun has exploded and the Earth is 5 trillion particles scattered lightyears away from one another. College, on the other hand, will end, and we will run out of time. Although the idea of this is frightening beyond belief, and even though there’s nothing we can do to stop it or even slow it down, here are 4 ways you can get off that phone and make those 5 hours and 16 minutes feel like 5 hours and 16 minutes (and, more importantly, without spending a dime.)
Listen to an audiobook
Believe it or not, your mom and her friends were onto something. For people who love to read, watch movies, or rewatch Tana Mongeau’s stalker story times, but can’t find the time or energy to do any of the above and more often than not end up turning to Instagram Reels instead, audiobooks are the perfect way to get your storytime in without increasing your screen time. If you have a library card for almost any library, you can easily connect it to Libby’s Mobile app and browse hundreds of completely free audiobooks. If you don’t have a library card, can’t get one, or have too many overdue books piled on your desk at home to check any out, don’t sweat it. YouTube has hundreds of free audiobooks, and, if you have an iPhone, you can turn on Picture in Picture and continue to play the audiobook from the music play button in your control center even if your phone is off. If you wanna get crazy, there’s a sleep timer on the YouTube app that you can set so the audiobook pauses when you fall asleep! While it can take time to get used to audiobooks, once you find one you like, you’ll never be able to quit.
Listen to an album all the way through
Unfortunately, the snobs were right about this one. Albums are as important to be appreciated as a whole as much as a television show or movie is. While a lot of albums today are constructed to have one good song and a bunch of filler songs, a lot of albums aren’t, and with the amount of music out there you really can’t get bored. This doesn’t mean you need to listen to 6 hours of instrumental techno-shoegaze while staring at the ceiling and pretending to like it otherwise you’re a poser. Just pick a song you love and listen to the whole album all the way through without looking at your phone or doing something else, regardless of how many times you’ve listened to it before. Pick a song that reminds you of last summer, your favorite song in seventh grade, the Challengers soundtrack (highly recommend), or that Halsey song that plays in the dining hall 5 times a day that has been permanently stuck in your head since September. Give an airpod to a friend and play the soundtrack of that one movie you both like. The speed at which pop culture moves leads people to sometimes forget that music isn’t supposed to make you look cool because, at the end of the day, nobody cares that much. Music is an accessory to emotion meant to amplify whatever you want to feel (and nobody has to know if you listen to Glee).
Cardio
Really hear me out with this one. Personally when I go to the gym, ten minutes on the treadmill feels like a trillion years. For me, changing, walking to the gym from my dorm, working out, and heading back takes around 30 minutes. If you have 30 minutes before you wanna shower, bite the bullet and jog around for ten minutes. Remember, every long brutal painful second is a gift. You’re alive! Cherish it!
Draw
Instead of pulling up Canvas, draw on one! Despite what people say, anyone can learn to draw. Take out that notebook you thought you’d use for that one class in freshman year and draw the tree in front of you. If it’s bad, good! If you’re with a friend sitting outside class, give each other a prompt, play a round of Pictionary, or draw each other. You learn quickly how interesting the world is when you stop to look at it closely and with a purpose. People watch in the park or the library and make up backstories for everyone. People meet their soulmates on a college campus, and who knows, maybe you could be the first one to see it in real life!
Of course, as I said before, these habits don’t appear overnight, especially when screens have invaded every second of our lives. I’ve always felt guilty for my screen time because adults who had the privilege of growing up without phones fail to understand that this is the world we were born into. Screens have been shown to us throughout our most neuroplastic years. Our screen addiction has been fed to us, and the guilt we feel for the time we waste weighs so heavily, yet feels completely uncontrollable. Like opening a grade for a test you feel like you bombed, we avoid uncomfortable things, and it makes sense. College is hard, more than just academically, and when you have a long, hard day, sometimes you just want to watch Instagram reels in the fetal position until you fall asleep, and you want to be able to do it without someone in your ear telling you it’s bad for you. Screens are just one of the many things ingrained into society that are bad for us. You can’t avoid every bad thing without locking yourself in a hole, and everyone has something that they love that isn’t good for them. ( (Your grandparents may not have had phones, but they had cigarettes!) It’s also hard to think into the future when tomorrow feels impossibly far. It just isn’t realistic to plan so far ahead when things are so uncertain, and things feel so temporary. Even though you know it’s important, it’s unrealistic for that to change your mind.
However, the time you spend is non-refundable, and it’s a gift to have something that we can miss. Not everyone can say that they have 4 entire years’ worth of something they miss. 4 years that they would give anything to return to even the worst moments. Not only do you only have 1 life and one body, but you only get one chance to be here, in this time and this place. So be selfish and milk the time you have for all it’s worth. Turn off your phone and watch the clouds move in the sky, people watch in Aldrich Park, watch a bug move around on your wall, listen to the sounds of people walking past your window, run until you feel like your chest is going to cave in, watch scary movies and go places without a map and stay up till dawn with your friends, because nothing lasts forever, and someday soon this will all be gone. For once, think only of yourself.