By Spencer Gordon

In the article titled, “A Thursday at Home,” Jeremiah Jensen confuses “escapism” with “freedom.” While I appreciate the positive nature of the article, these two distinct concepts have important implications in the context of the author’s assertions.

The article describes students in a bacchanalian state at a dingy bar enjoying their youth. I am sure many of them are not getting drunk or having casual sex, but the article paints a picture of Home Bar as “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” I have been to bars like Home Bar, and unless I am very drunk, it is not fun.

In any case, the idea that freedom is going to a bar, getting hammered and having casual sex is a fallacy. It is really alluring to go to places like Home Bar and see people acting the way the article describes and think: “Damn, look at how happy (free) that guy is; he is with that good looking girl and he looks like he comes from a lot of money. He must be really happy and free from worry.”

While there are constraints placed on each one of us, we all enjoy a huge amount of freedom as American university students. We are able to make choices everyday about how we live our lives. The natural next step from this is to ask ourselves why we are making the choices we make and are these choices making us “happy” or more importantly fulfilled.

This kind of comparative thinking described above is the antithesis of happiness and fulfillment. Sean Achor, in his book The Happiness Advantage, writes about the time when he moved to Harvard from Waco after applying on a whim. He describes how grateful he was to be there and how everyday was a blessing. After several weeks, Sean looked around at his peers and observed that they had become so stressed about competing with their fellow students, a subset of the brightest people in the world, that they had lost their sense of gratitude.

Through Achor’s many years of psychological study as a professor at Harvard. he has found that true happiness and freedom take work. Professor Achor writes about how a sense of gratitude can be cultivated through simple exercises like writing down three positive things that took place in the previous 24 hours or exercising just thirty minutes a day. While it is easier and more socially acceptable to go out and get drunk, take an honest inventory of your feelings the next day, even after you took the best looking girl home from the bar. I imagine you will find that your happiness is ephemeral.

Happiness must be defined by the individual. It is relative to the individual’s sense of fulfillment which stems from nature or nurture, which is another article for another time.

The good news is that each of us is blessed with the best opportunity of our lives to change our habits and start making choices that make us happy. There is a great Ted Talk by Meg Jay titled “Why 30 is not the new 20” that describes how transformational one’s twenties can be if the individual is willing to work hard to figure out who he or she is during this time.[1] We are each truly blessed to be here and have an incredible opportunity everyday to find the fulfilling life that each of us dream about.

As we all have the opportunity to take a break over the next month, I really encourage you to honestly access what makes you happy. If late night drunken revelry is fulfilling to you, then by all means carry on. However, please do not confuse escapism with freedom.

[1] The TED Talk is an excerpt from Meg Jay’s book titled: The Defining Decade.

Spencer Gordon is a graduate student in the SMU Cox School of Business.