As I sit here on a Friday evening contemplating what to write about, most people I know are gearing up for the weekend, a time, according to many college students, to party. "Going out" is a norm of Friday and Saturday nights in a college town, consisting of drinking (debatably) too much with friends, going to (probably) mediocre parties or (definitely) trashy bars, and neglecting all things school-related. Sunday, then, often becomes a day of cramming a weekend's worth of studying into one day.

I've heard people describe drinking/going out as being a sort of release after a stressful week, and a way to relax and forget about school for a while. In fact, this opinion seems very popular among my peers. To me, though, going out means losing sleep, feeling shitty the next day, and neglecting to do things I should be doing. That is not to say that I never go out, or that it's never a good time. It's just not something I find myself interested in doing several times a week, or even every week for that matter. For me, personally, there are many options for a good, stress-free time that don't include going out. I would even argue that going out is not stress-free, because it's time-consuming and it leaves me more stressed out about all the work that I put off in order to actually go out.

We've probably all heard of the term FOMO, and for those of you who haven't, FOMO stands for "fear of missing out" and is commonly used to describe situations in which someone fears he/she will be left out of a good time. But the thing is, it's okay to stay in once in a while, and it's even okay never to go out, if that's what you choose. It's okay to tell your friends that you'd rather watch Netflix, or catch up on sleep, or dive into the pile of homework/studying that you've been procrastinating.

But what's not okay, in my opinion, is for people to make you feel guilty for doing whatever the hell you want to do. You can go out, but you don't have to, and you should be able to do both of those things without feeling guilty. I guess my point is that you shouldn't feel pressured to go out when you have 5,000 other obligations staring you in the face, or even if you just don't want to. You shouldn't go solely for the fear of missing a good time if you don't actually feel like it.

That being said, if you choose to go out it should be because you want to, and not for any other reason. I think sometimes people feel condemned for choosing otherwise, or feel 'lame' for not carrying the same interests as others their age, but I think it's completely okay to choose whatever you want to do, so long as you are choosing in light of your own interests and desires and not somebody else's.