I’m not sure I could write a better example myself. There’s nothing wrong with the sentiment, but I feel a nagging sense of despair whenever I reread the words.
Because I’ve been eating the same pizza for the last five years. I’ve been having my pizza and eating it too. I’ve been feeling guilty, and feeling good about feeling guilty, and failing to cut my guilt off at the source.
I’m talking about myself and not the members of the Yale Student Roundtable, because they could all be vegetarian by now for all I know. But me? I haven’t done most of the things I promised myself I’d do.
And when I make promises to myself, they are almost always reactive promises: to be more productive when the clock strikes midnight and the essay is a blank page, to do more cardio when I find myself winded after a quick sprint to class, to stop eating the pizza when everything is gone but the crust. Sometimes, life seems like a long struggle to stop eating the pizza, in a world where better and better pizzas are baked each day, in the oven of… society. And Buzzfeed is the pepperoni? This is a good stopping point.
I originally titled this post “College Morality in One Sentence”. That was unfair, and condescending. After all, who’s to say things get better after you graduate?