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By Kyle Doyle
The days grow longer, the sense of freedom grows stronger and the work ethic plummets. No longer do the feelings of school work anxiety and pressure to keep grades up plague the senior as he or she aimlessly walks from class to class, blissfully aware of the feelings of apathy they are experiencing.
The senior I’m describing has the dreaded sickness known as Senioritis.
“I have a severe case of senioritis,” said a senior that declined to be named for the fear teachers would know just how lazy they really are. “It has been with me for pretty much all of high school, but it’s been especially bad this final semester.”
As a senior, I can personally testify to the feelings of this lazy senior on senioritis affecting my effort. It’s brought my effort levels from high to low. Low like T-Pain. Low like the Marianas Trench. Low like the approval ratings of our 31st president Herbert J. Hoover after passing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and thoroughly beating the U.S. GDP into the dirt during the Great Depression.
What am saying is this: I’m content with how life is going and I’m coasting on the waves of laziness until graduation.
This strategy is actually working, believe it or not. I’m still getting my work done, doing fine on tests, and I’m almost completely relaxed. However, just because it works for me doesn’t mean it works for everybody.
I make it work by balancing time. I’m lazy all the time, except for short intervals of productivity. And in those short intervals, stuff gets done.
But, I must confess: This is the third version of this strategy. There have been others; they have worked, but not amazingly. So, these systems have been revised over the years.
Yes, years. Senioritis is no longer just for seniors.
“I don’t really know when it started,” junior Sebastian Butler said. “I mean, I still do my assignments, I just don’t care that much as to what ends up happening, and I find myself just doing the bare minimum possible to get credit for it.”
It isn’t just a senior issue anymore. The weight of standardized testing, advanced classes, extracurriculars and a social life are burning us out early. Butler, Lazy Senior and myself are living, breathing proof.
It seems silly to complain about procrastination, something that everybody encounters, but senioritis is it’s own vein of procrastina.
Senioritis is the burnout of all the freshmen-entering-high-school enthusiasm we’ve been harboring for years. We’ve coasted off that enthusiasm, and in most cases it doesn’t last to the end.
Maybe because it is the end. The end of being a kid and graduating into adulthood, facing challenges, meeting people, and making decisions that we never had as kids.
That’s why we get senioritis. We want to slow down now that we’re almost to the end. We’ve rushed to get here and now we’re filled with regret that we didn’t stop to smell the roses we sped passed. We’re not ready for the shift no matter what we tell ourselves.
We’re not ready for the weight of hundreds of new responsibilities. We’re not ready to take the world head on. You can tell yourself whatever you want. You can plan and do whatever you think will prep you for adult life, but it won’t play out like it did in your head. I guarantee it.
Take it from me. A dreamer whose head is so far up in the clouds that reality is equivalent to me jumping to my death.
Well, somebody get me a ladder. Because it’s time to come down.
