Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter involved in time processing. Dopamine agonists—compounds that activate dopamine receptors—tend to speed up our perception of time, which passes more quickly.
Recent research by neuro-physiologists and chemists working on time processing is beginning to show how emotions may speed up or slow down our perception of time. In 2011 professor Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil, a lecturer on cognition and learning at Poitiers University, France, published a study of how changes in the emotional state of subjects caused by watching films affect their sense of time.
Two weeks of basketball practice. Two more weeks of track practice. Two weeks until a college counselor has an opening in their schedule. Two more months of first semester. Six more months of freshman year. Four more years of college. A lifetime of uncertainty.
In 2015, I thought of all these variables as I sat with a hundred students inside the journalism building on the University of Massachusetts campus. Sitting in that room with me were students of all genders, athletes and nonathletes, freshmen and seniors, black and white and brown. But when we arrived at the topic of pressure, of perfectionism and quitting, all of them reacted the same way: knowingly. They had felt these pressures, to varying degrees. And they seemed hungry to be understood, and hungry to hear that many of their peers had felt the same way.
Those lucky enough to grow up envisioning college start hearing about the building blocks of a college résumé (the boxes that need checking; the optics that need preserving) from the moment they enter high school, and sometimes even sooner. Too often, kids are herded into commitments and activities that are born not of passion but of obligation. These obligations can continue for years because stopping is not seen as a possibility. Those who do stop risk being perceived as lacking the intestinal fortitude to push through when the going gets tough.
Of course, sometimes (perhaps even often) inner strength is exactly what’s needed and quitting is absolutely the wrong move, and if you push through the low points, you may find a reserve within yourself you never knew you had. But at other times, a commitment or decision can be accurately identified as the cause of unhappiness, and continuing to walk in that direction isn’t necessarily going to lead you through the wilderness to a bright, blue clearing with birds chirping and a flowing river at your feet. Continuing that path can bury you deeper and deeper in the woods until you’re lost, with no memory of how to get out.
Knowing the difference requires listening to and trusting yourself. Picture a doctor holding a stethoscope to your heart so that she can decipher even the shallowest of beats, the subtle shift in rhythm. That is the kind of precision with which you must know yourself in order to make these types of fork-in-the-road decisions. Yet are we equipping kids with the tools to pursue this empowering self-knowledge?
In Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, William Deresiewicz observes that our education system seems to be producing kids who have trouble thinking critically and finding their purpose. In an interview with Slate, he offered the following insight: “The point is not what you do but why you do it, how you choose it… I understand that parents are worried about their children’s future. But we have to look at what we’re doing to our kids. We have to have the strength to raise them to care about something other than ‘success’ in the very narrow terms in which it’s come to be defined. I’m not saying you can have it all: In fact, that’s one of my biggest messages in the book. You have to choose. Parents already tell their kids to ‘do what you love’ and ‘follow your dreams.’ But kids know that they don’t really mean it, that what they really want is status and success. Well, we have to really mean it.”
Inside that room at the University of Massachusetts, I told the story of how I had tried to quit college basketball. Yet before I got to my ultimate point, I looked out at the audience and could almost see their eyes glazing over, bracing to be scolded—perhaps about the frequency of quitting among their generation, about their collective lack of follow-through and focus. But that wasn’t my point at all. In fact, it was the opposite: Didn’t they agree that the stigma around quitting sometimes forces us to stay in toxic situations? And wasn’t it possible that this is even worse among millennials, who have been accused of being a fickle, lazy generation who require things to go their way?
At this the students seemed to lean forward, to let out a collective sigh. I asked whether any of them understood what I was trying to say—if they could relate, or if I was projecting my ideas onto the next generation. They stayed silent for a minute. Then a number of hands lifted. A young woman in the front row caught my eye. I nodded, encouraging her to share.
“I’m a sophomore now, here, but I initially started at a different college,” she said. “I was so unhappy, right from the beginning, but I didn’t think I could tell anyone, because I had told everyone that was the school of my dreams. I didn’t want anyone to think I was giving up, or quitting. And I couldn’t even understand, myself, if I was being weak, or if I genuinely needed to leave.”
“Right?” I said. “Sometimes it’s so confusing to know what the ‘best’ decision is—because, really, ultimately, who even knows?”
“I just got to a point where I was so unhappy, I talked to my parents about it.”
“What did they say?”
“They were supportive, but of course they didn’t want me to leave that school, because it was a brand name, and they were worried that I was jeopardizing my future options. And they were worried that I was too young to know what I wanted.”
“And how did you feel?” I asked.
“Trapped—it just wasn’t for me. And it finally got to the point where losing the identity of that school, how it supposedly reflected positively on me, was less important than needing to walk away and be happy again.”
“How did your parents deal with that?”
“They get it now. They see how much calmer and happier I am here.”
She lifted her UMass water bottle, took a sip. We continued the conversation for another half hour, the large group now beginning to resemble something more intimate. Some in attendance had transferred to UMass from other schools, while still others had considered leaving, perhaps believing they would be happier elsewhere. All were concerned about image—not just their own, but also the image of their generation as one that pursues self-satisfaction and happiness supposedly with brazen disregard for anything else, including ideals of responsibility and the greater good.