I am writing this from one of the seats on the long U-shaped table on the fourth floor of the Academic Cultural Complex (ACC). It is 9:30 p.m. on a Monday, three weeks prior to the exam week. But the seats are already full of diligent students either working on end of term projects or studying into the night. While the anxiety brought by the end of term burden is distressing, it is a familiar one too. As I approach the 14th exam week of my 7th semester, I am sitting here, thinking about how I’ve grown used to even the heebie-jeebies.
Life in KAIST is boring. Let’s start with that. It is sometimes too boring that exam weeks easily become the only indication of time — they’re at least eventful. During the semester, each day is a repetition of the same routine, and by the time you get to the last few years of undergrad, breaks won’t be too different either, as you’d probably be working in a lab or participating in an internship program. Without convenient access to public transportation, it is not easy to escape the usual radius around the campus, and even if we had the means to do so, it would still not be easy with the amount of workload we have for most parts of the semester. If you decide to move on to grad school in KAIST, the boredom will only intensify. Go to lab, come back home, repeat. And who knows how much longer you’d be stuck there for?
But it was only when I lost the “normal” due to COVID-19 that I started missing the things I never knew I would. At the start of 2020, just as I was thinking that there was nothing more to be surprised about for the rest of my life in KAIST, corona happened. Each day was eventful. People were going to come back to school, and then they weren’t, and then they were, but then they didn’t. Lecture schedules changed every week, and no one knew what to expect next. Eventually, once we got ourselves settled in the pandemic life, most of us found ourselves stuck in what was probably the worst case of boredom we’ve ever experienced. I probably ate about 50 Hetbahns alone in my dorm room during the spring semester, and I missed complaining about how bad the food from school cafeterias was. I missed that glass of beer after a particularly long day that would help me get back on my feet the next day, and I even missed the daily trips to the library during exam weeks, or racing frantically from one building to another between classes. And I realized that these were the things I’d miss once I did escape Daejeon one day.
It is easy to start thinking that boring equals depressing. We often think that life has to be eventful, whether it be good or bad, or that there must be something out there. But it is only natural that we grow used to whatever we do, as there will only be one “first” to everything. The thrill from your first day of school, the anxiety on your first day at work, and the excitement of discovering a good place to eat are not things that you get to experience too often. The only thing that’s left for us from that point on is to grow used to it. So, the stagnation we experience from a routine may also be an indication of stability and balance. Life does have its “ups and downs”, but rather than an ever-oscillating sine graph, it may actually look more like a damped wave, converging to a state of equilibrium.
I am still sitting here in the ACC, appreciating the fact that I get to work in my usual boring workspace until 12 a.m., unlike last semester, when the building used to close at 6 p.m. I am fully aware that “count your blessings” is the lamest of all advice for someone who is dissatisfied with where they are, and that is not what I am asking for. All I am trying to say is that boredom and the sense of stagnation is not always something we have to feel anxious about. We’ve all been good students, set enough goals, and achieved a lot of them up till now. If you are feeling stagnant and bored with your life, remember what the USA Today bestselling author J. Lynn once said: “Sometimes when things are falling apart, they may actually be falling into place.”
