Image by Greg Furry via Flickr
Rhys Williams | Staff Writer
rhys.williams@fiusm.com
All of my calluses are gone.
I can remember being a kid and never wearing shoes, coming home only when it was too dark to keep playing basketball or football. My calluses came from running on the hot asphalt, beginning at noon or earlier, not even noticing the heat after a half hour or so and then staying there until night time, besides maybe a quick five or ten minute break to grab something to eat.
In the many years of doing this, probably over a decade of my life, I built up thick soles on my feet and had thick calluses on my hands from all of the outdoor activities over the years.
Now, the calluses are gone. I noticed when I went to South Beach with some friends from out of the country; I was walking on a harder, more shell-filled area when I realized that my feet were hurting and even had some cuts. That really hit home, and not just because of the pain.
That experience helped me to realize that we, as millennials, are getting less and less time to be ourselves due to the college life.
That may sound strange, but in a way it explains everything.
We get to college and try new things to see if we want to do them. For me, that involved working on a political campaign in 2012, beginning my career working at FIU Student Media and even partying. Of course, not all of those things are long term but they add up. I’m not saying to not try new and different things.
Add in time for classes and studying, sleeping and other necessary things, and the amount of hours we need in a day increases; this doesn’t even include the pressure to find an internship for most, if not all, degree programs in order to become more employable.
All of these things take away from letting us be free and they are weakening our generation in my opinion. In my thought all these things hinder us from being able to stay in shape if we have to devote a larger amount of time to school and work. I know this goes both ways though. Some people eat nothing during the entire work day because they are so focused on their jobs or people eat many more calories than they can burn from just sitting at a desk or doing most other jobs.
Not to mention a large amount of the people that I know would rather sit around drinking and on their phones in the middle of the day than go out, maybe throw a football around, go to the pool, or shoot some hoops.
Again, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy time playing Clash of Clans every now and again but believe me I would much rather spend my free afternoons outdoors throwing a football with some friends, or even strangers. This is not a plug to say something cheesy about meeting new people but if you do, you do.
Yes, the argument will always exist that you can set your own free time in college but that is not the case. Although there are a lot of students, including myself, that schedule a majority of their classes at night or early in the morning to have the rest of the day free, most of those students do so because of work, major-required internships, or other personal reasons.
Yeah, we need job experience, but let us live through the cliches of the “best years of our lives” and “discovering ourselves” for a little while before we get into the nitty-gritty of working and the real world.
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