Mid-life crisis.

The term draws up thoughts of your Dad buying a motorcycle to feel young again, or perhaps your Mom developing a sudden fascination with online dating. We regard the phenomena like a tidal wave approaching thousands of yards away. Eventually, we’ll be in the same position. Until then, we’re safe in dorm rooms that shelter us like incubators, and not a grey hair in sight.

Still, the mid-life crisis may have an upcoming contender. According to the Boston Globe, the twenty-first century has only strengthened the power of the “quarter-life crisis.” To summarize the conflict here, we only have to turn to the opening lines of the Broadway musical Avenue Q: “What do you do with a B.A in English? What is my life going to be?”

You have your diploma and you've shaken hands with the dean. Just like that, you’re cast off into the real world and set off to swim against the current. When the autumn comes around graduation, you find yourself in an interesting position where – for the first time in sixteen years – you don’t necessarily have to be anywhere.

Think about it. You had to go to elementary school. You had to go to middle school and high school. To an extent, there was even a societal pressure that got you to go to college. When you graduate, you’re looking at a highway with thousands of different roads branching out in every direction. You’re still expected to be somewhere, don’t get me wrong, but the problem now is that there’s now an infinite amount of places you could be. The destination is entirely on your shoulders.

But let’s skip back a bit. While post-graduation life in itself holds some struggles, I think we often overlook another crisis: the fact that college is intended to be the best years of your entire life.

It’s a notion populated in film and television. It’s strengthened when your parents speak to family friends at parties about the wild times they had at their fraternities and sororities. When you step onto campus as a freshman, it’s almost like there’s two different objectives. On one hand, you’re supposed to do well academically and prepare for the real world. On the other hand, perhaps there’s already something more subconscious at work in your mind. Maybe part of you is already pressuring yourself to enjoy your college experience for everything its worth. When you’re sitting in your dorm room alone on Friday night, stranded because your friends were busy for whatever reason, your life feels like Castaway when it should feel like Animal House. You search through contacts on your phone and scroll through social media. You see pictures of people with red solo cups and have to wonder: is there this hidden truth, this ritualistic part of the college experience, that you’re missing out on? Even when you go out to a party next weekend, rejoined by your squad, does everybody smiling in the pictures the next morning live a life more fulfilling and exciting than yours?

In the social media age, we have a way of generalizing people’s lives. Life experiences and events are distilled into one-hundred-and-eighty character tweets. When we see pictures of classmates at parties with flashing neon lights, it’s hard not to think that their lives are magical; it’s also hard to not start to feel jealous. When you see your friend from your biology class zip-lining on their study abroad trip to Panama, it’s easy to dismiss any problems in their personal lives. After all, zip-lining is badass. So what is it about Facebook – this augmentation of smiling faces and party invitations – that makes us feel so pressured to become something we already are?

In the nineteen-eighties movie Heathers, the lead character Veronica Sawyer comments on happiness: “If you were happy every day of your life, you wouldn’t be human. You’d be a game show host.” If Veronica is right, some of us might feel inclined to sign up for Jeopardy.

But maybe the myth here goes even deeper than social media. Many older adults speak about their past times in college with earnestness and nostalgia. When we hear this repeated over and over, it feels like college is supposed to be this exciting, stimulating vacation that we have to milk for all its worth. It almost feels like some kind of mini-game in Mario Party: have a bunch of college students into the ring, collect as many happiness fruits as possible and then run out before they turn into adults overnight.

It’s as if happiness fruits can’t be accumulated elsewhere else. After college, we have our whole lives ahead of us with thousands of different events and exciting, interesting people to meet. Here, they’ll be other trees that bare bananas and plums and grapes. Perhaps these happiness fruits down the road won’t be the same shade or color. Perhaps they won’t bare the same tangy nectar as the ones you’ll eat in college – which I can only imagine tastes like an exotic mix between Smirnoff and jungle juice.

But nobody should tell us how many of these fruits we should eat, nor should they dictate to us the color and taste we should prefer. In my many years playing Mario Party, I’ve collected hundreds of bananas. The best moments weren’t when I ranked up a high score and followed the instructions themselves, but rather when I bumbled through these mini-games with my friends like an idiot. When we played Mario Party, there were no winners and no losers, and we weren’t waiting on instructions on how to have fun; instead, we enjoyed each other’s company and played on our own terms. This often involved breaking the rules of the mini-games, consequently falling off into the deep sanctums of endless Mario pits. It sometimes involved the artificial intelligence players beating us because they always found the stars before we did. If somebody is telling you that you’re supposed to have fun, I’ve always believed in more colorful, inventive ways of getting to the destination. If you sit there waiting to have fun because instructions tell you to, life becomes a collage of tasks and routines. We lose our presence, and instead with our smiling faces, we become the empty Facebook pictures that we post on our feed. We become our own, personal illusion, believing we’re supposed to be having fun, and yet never taking in the world enough to do so.

There is a reason that our world treats college like a magical time. As you connect with people your age from all around the globe, the world turns into a place that will open at the touch of a fingertip. We find a love that exists between friends that join each other hung-over for bagels on Saturday mornings, and with young love in dorm rooms that feels fresh and new and exciting.

So with that being said, have at it.

Enjoy this magical time, because it is magical, but also don't fall into the trap of striving for happiness because you're supposed to be.

There's the face on your Facebook that everyone sees, the face that isn't you, but rather a reflection. Rather than live up to the standards of what a "good time" should be, live and forget. Enjoy yourself. Go crazy. Go zip-lining. Get drunk. Write a thesis. Cure cancer. Spend nights on your own. Spend nights with hundreds of people packed in a tiny room. Do whatever you need to do in the given moment to be happy. There's not just one tree of bananas and grapes that grows on your college campus. There's millions of them, all over the planet, that bare different kinds of fruit and different kinds of adventures. Cultivate your own life. Live on your own terms and strive for your own ideal of what happiness should be.

Nobody can tell you what a college experience is supposed to be, and nobody, not even Mario himself in all his swagger, can stop you from filling your basket with as much fruit as possible.