The Sentiment of Tomorrow

A Game Changer in Growing Up

I came across a video that appeared on my Snapchat memories from around a year ago. It was a video I suggested we make for my friends and my future selves, as we hiked to our dorm across campus. We asked all the enthralling questions we had at the time, like about the apartment we had waited two years to live in and whether we had received news of important decisions we were anticipating since before college. At the time, it felt like we held a certain naivety and uncertainty that we’ve now lost as we aged another year.

It took me a while to realize that making such a video in the first place had long deemed me an overly sentimental friend. It’s shone through in its subtle ways like the constant need to document funny moments in a group setting or to force my friends to relish in deep conversations. It could’ve also been fueled by the urge to detail snippets of my events and exchanges with others masked away in the pages of my journals. Aside from writing, my first twenty-minute stint with iMovie showcased a montage of thirty or so recorded clips dedicated to my senior year spring break trip. Since then, the desire only grew to relive those memories through my unfiltered lens at that moment in time. I’ve decided to make one for every trip, knowing well that by the time I’d return, I’d be crouched behind the screen and airdropping clips to my laptop while sampling the best song to put in the background. The views for each video could’ve made it past the double digits if I were lucky, however, despite claiming they were made for the overall enjoyment of friends and family, deep down I knew they were always for me to watch in a late-night spiral.

Regardless of how I’ve memorialized these times, I’ve noticed that the itch to do so comes from a need to grasp on to the moments of the present, so I could give the future a chance to revive the memories from the past.

Since starting this semester, I feel like I’ve been reliving the heavy mental transition from being an underclassman to an upperclassman that I also once experienced in high school. Junior year has consistently felt like the year where the responsibilities that once loomed like a dark cloud inch closer and closer until there’s no choice but to face them. Only now, the tasks that we are expected to face have amassed into this messy storm of preparing for the adult world, while readjusting from an unprecedented pandemic lifestyle. Regardless, the months have been on a stop-clock, with each week lapping the previous week by an even shorter pace. Each weekend is filled with cultural events, 21st birthdays, and parties almost like an ode to a year lost from the prime of our youth.

Ideally, I’d go answer all questions in that video with the same innocence and eagerness they were being asked. I’d share how we joyously made our way back to the world and that the lingering excitement we abandoned as nineteen-year-olds would rejoice with us at twenty-one. Without realizing it, our new normal had quickly minimized to just getting through the day, the next week, or the next year. We relentlessly talked about life after the

pandemic like it was a broken record, and that when the time came, we would finally be ready to live it. However, now there’s pressure to appear at every event, which has become more of a desperate attempt to quickly scramble and soak up the precious time gone to five months of Dalgona coffee and TikTok trends. That desire to be everywhere at once has faded into what feels like a combination of a dying social battery and a vanishing piece of our youth.

I had a conversation about this when I saw some of my friends back home. It had been a shared feeling for all of us that nothing had the same appeal it did just a few years before. We talked about how at one point my visits to their BIG10 schools’ during our freshmen year were stretched to experience every minute of its wildest potential. Yet, this year, we ditched our plans hours early to pile onto an air mattress with a cup of tea before crashing at midnight in true grandma fashion.

I’ve given due credit for this change to time simply feeling warped. We’ve long talked about how life goes by in the blink of an eye, and we’re passing milestones like they’re just items on our checklists of things to do. But at the same time, life hadn’t felt as slow as it did the first few months of quarantine. With this comes the realization that we’re getting older, which comes with its own baggage. We might start to dread our birthdays or notice that we resemble our parents more and more each day. However, growing up also means outgrowing the people, goals, or expectations we had for ourselves in the past.

Regardless of if our warped perception of time is another mind game or a true scientific phenomenon, I’ve noticed that we often expect other people to remain stagnant throughout their life, as we grow and change. Maybe that exemplifies our slightly narcissistic tendencies as humans, but time continues regardless of if we’re ready. Especially, as we age into the beginning of adulthood, we’re still living in the worlds we built in our heads as kids or teenagers or before the pandemic. We continue to feed the piece of our imaginations with the pictures, journal entries, and videos that memorialized them at the time. Despite my itch to return to everything we had left in place, time did pass, and many of us might want to cling to the people we were years ago. There is some good in that concept, though it seems like we’re mourning something that we lost. It shows that regardless of what happens in our lives, humans are wired to evolve in new places and eras of time. More importantly, it’s that there’s a comfort in living in the sentiment of yesterday and hoping that it will mirror tomorrow.