Everything in our young lives is based on an abstraction: time. We American college students especially rush through our lives at top speed ‘ whether it’s rushing to finish an assignment on a hung-over Sunday afternoon or running in the dead of the morning at 5:50 a.m. (side-stepping deer along the way) to make that morning practice ‘ we whiz through our lives.

What is at the end of our entire speeding/whizzing journey? Next time you’re bored, take a hint and visit a cemetery. Take a moment and look at the tombstones. That, literally, is the end result of this rushing, worry-filled journey ‘ a slab of rock.

Is that really what we want? Is that really all there is when our time is up? If you hate deadlines and hate being rushed all the time, take some more practical advice: (1) Get your shit done ahead of time. Do it yourself first and go get help if you need it. (2) Enjoy what you are doing. If you are not, ask yourself what you are truly doing here and what you mean to accomplish.

Maybe you don’t want to go to college. Maybe like Paul Rudd in ‘Knocked Up,’ you’d like to live in India for a year ‘ make sure you weigh the costs and benefits of doing such a thing.

What particularly gets me irate is the fact that everybody nowadays (quite specifically our youthful peers) does everything because it’s how everybody else (their parents, their friends, their siblings) did the same. Don’t just go to college to get a job, use this experience as a stepping stone to bigger opportunities.

Don’t go to work just to make money, go to work to keep further self-developing yourself. Have no limits ‘ the true individuals who initialized companies out of nothing and/or invented/founded any sort of thing never retired.

Play to your strengths. This is a phrase I am sure you have heard countless times, but as you probably know, it is initially quite difficult to discover what we are actually good at. What you are good at comes from what you truly love doing and would never, ever get tired of. Join clubs even if you have the slightest interest in it; you might just discover something about yourself you never knew.

Prior to my college years I was an awful public speaker ‘ I took a basic acting class here in Bing, where I learned to actually let go of all the anxieties that are packed in with stage-fright, and in the end, I essentially came out on top with exemplary social skills (although a few unnamed persons might disagree).

The point is, don’t just go through these years handing in rancid and dreaded assignments on time just because you have to ‘ determine what the professor is trying to help you with by giving you those specific assignments. Join the clubs you’ve always wanted to and, yes, go out and have fun Downtown, but just remember that it’s the same old scene over and over. And if you do the same routine over and over, that little piece of rock is what will be the outcome.

Yet if you actually make use of your time and do that what you truly desire to do (and not what others have done) your life just might be more enjoyable, fulfilling and purposeful than the typical, Yankee-loving, go-through-the-motions Binghamton University student.