Sunsets

 

 

Sebastian Gutierrez

 

 

 

Right now, most of you reading this are twenty somethings with extremely bright futures ahead of you.  Many of you were the stars of your high school, if not area, if not state, if not country.  Then you got here and things changed.  All of a sudden, everything was challenging.  From the first moment you got here you were in competition with all the other freshman for spots in a fraternity, sorority, independent living group, or dorm.  You compared SAT scores, compared achievements, and found that they, like you, were amazingly accomplished.  Many were National Merit Scholars, AP Scholars, Governor’s School participants, Math Olympiad winners, Science Fair winners, and Scholarship recipients.

 

MIT is the premier science and engineering school in the country if not the world.  Within it’s walls, minds have been coached and trained to excel in such diverse areas as film, computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, math, physics, economics, management, chemistry, architecture, and aero-space engineering.  In Hollywood we are portrayed as the end all be all.  In the movie Independence Day the scientist who discovers the secrets of the aliens is an MIT Ph.D.  Also an MIT PhD in Physics is portrayed as a scientist in the movie Armageddon.  People travel from all parts of the world to walk through our hallways and to hear MIT professors give lectures and to watch students cross at 77 Massachusetts Avenue.

           

So you start school and soon find that the work that is assigned for the most part is busy work.  Going to bed at four or five am start to seem like reasonable bedtime hours.  In addition to this, you can actually count how many hours you have slept in the last three days on your hands.  Suddenly, you don’t see yourself as being lucky for being so privileged as to be attending MIT.  Complaining about how much work you have, how little you slept last night, and how much this place “sucks” seems to pepper all the conversations that you have during the day.  Not only that, but the administration knows what it does to students so they have three-day and four-day weekends to let the students let off a little steam.   The administration calls these weekends “long weekends”, whereas the students call them as “Suicide Weekends” – They are held so that students don’t become over-stressed and commit suicide.

           

Suddenly, you find yourself in the middle of finals week sweating and stressing like there is no tomorrow.  In fact, you are so sure that there is no tomorrow that you resort to measures that rival those that would be taken were you insane.  Case in Point: A friend of mine, afraid of failing miserably took enough caffeine pills to get her through the last weekend of finals and all through her finals (three days) without sleeping so that she could study the amount of material that she felt was needed in order to ensure her success on her finals.  Yes, she went 5 days without sleeping because of the pressure.

           

A week later of continuous sleeping…if you’re an MIT student, you know what I mean, you’re finally coherent enough when you are awake to make sense of the outside world and what is going on around you.  Unfortunately this is when you start thinking of sunsets.  It doesn’t happen overnight, mind you; it happens a little bit at a time.  First, you find yourself looking longingly at a television commercial about cruises.  Driving in the snow seems a bit more bearable because you can see the sun, and you actually get a glare off of something natural, the sun and not a computer screen.  If you go skiing, you might actually get a suntan as opposed to a screen tan.

 

And then you find yourself thinking of sunsets just as February comes around and school starts once more.  By now you are on your second semester so you are more acclimated to the way that things work around MIT.  Not really though, but you try to convince yourself that you are acclimated nonetheless.  As you trudge your way through the knee-high snow you hear a clean crisp wave crashing on a warm beach as it gently laps at your tan feet.  No, you didn’t wake up drunk again; it’s the sunset coming back to remind you of what is really important in life.

That the equation you are about to learn in your class will have no purpose in your life.  When you are sixty enjoying that sunset you will not care whether there was a minus or a plus, or if in fact you were in chemistry and it was actually a compound and not an equation.  What you will actually care about is whether you made a difference to the people that you knew you and if you got everything out of life that you had hoped for in your childhood dreams.

 

Regrettably, or thankfully, I live across the river from MIT so I have a wondrously long walk to school, so I have plenty of time and chances to hear the “wind blowing through the palm trees.”  What have these walks taught me?  Nothing much really, but they have given me time to think about what most people want.

           

In my opinion most people want to retire in the Caribbean somewhere and have a little house on the beach while their stock portfolios are in New York City making them money.  They want to be provided for by the work that they have done and they want to have wonderful loving children who write them delightfully funny and extensive cards for no apparent reasons at all times of the year.  They also want to watch the sunsets.

 

How do these people think that they can get to this place in their dreams?  The solution that everybody follows is the idea of the “American Dream.”  The premise for this ‘Dream’ is as follows:  One works hard for a company and rises rapidly to the top; Once this is achieved, doors will open to investment opportunities that will bring enough wealth for one to retire; Then one can move to the Caribbean to watch sunsets.

 

Unfortunately, the key ingredient to make this dream come true is school.  In our society today you must have a great education to obtain a job, and an amazing education to get a great job.  An great job being one where doors will magically open for you and you will rise to the top faster than you can say, “I’m the king of the world, or at least Montana.”

           

Thus, boiled down to one sentence, the “American Dream” is: You study hard, then you work hard, in order to be able to watch the sunsets and play hard during your declining years.  That is it, no hidden term(s) in there, no exploding agreements, no free one if you buy a dozen, you just get what you order.

           

But what if there was an easier way?  A way that would allow you to circumvent the whole process and let you start watching the sunsets within four weeks without having to worry about your classes in school or your GPA. 

 

Here’s the way…Quit school and move to the Caribbean.  That’s it. Did you expect more?  I’ll tell it to you again, quit school and move to the Caribbean.  Once you are down there, you can set up a little shop and build a little house next to the beach and spend the rest of your life there watching sunsets.

 

Then what?  Well…then nothing.  You have achieved your dream.  Who cares about careers goals when you are having a tropical drink as the sun becomes less and less visible in the distance.

           

Okay, maybe you get bored after a couple of years of working on your suntan and you look to see what’s next.  Well, that’s the beauty of quitting school; you can’t do anything in the “real world” so you just stay there in your little island and think of other things to do.  For instance, a mechanical engineer (almost anyway…) like yourself could become a contractor and build magnificent decks for others on the Island and spend your time that way.  Or you could calculate how much money people on the Island are saving by having offshore bank accounts and then throw wild parties with the money that they have.  Regardless, you will ultimately lead an extremely relaxing and fulfilling life because you, unlike all the other shmucks going to work everyday in order to be able to retire some day and watch sunsets, are already watching sunsets during the prime of your life.

           

Why are you reading this?  Shouldn’t you go and start packing your bags right away?  You have a plane to catch and a world out there to explore and see.  What?  You don’t want to?  I get it, you must be like me.  I don’t want to see sunsets; I would rather see equations like y = mx +b.