Stress is a constant companion in our years as college students. Tomorrow always holds another item to cross off a list or task to worry about. But it’s all going to be worth it once we graduate, right?
Uncertainty about what lies beyond the walls of a university is a daunting but shared feeling for students.
Generation Z suffers from high rates of anxiety and depression, especially surrounding the future, the National Institutes of Health found. What used to be a shining place filled with possibility became a narrow ridge overcast by limits.
What’s holding us back from moving forward?
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is the highest it's been in the past 10 years, according to AP News. Environmental stressors, like the Trump administration’s drastic step back from environmental conservation, don’t help in our ability to imagine our future.
With all this in mind, it can feel embarrassing or childish to think there’s something we can do. When the world turns its back on you, it's easy to surrender control. Why try to swim away from currents everyone is facing?
Intense external pressures constrict our internal desires to push onward. We subject ourselves to a life where we live carelessly, looking down instead of looking forward.
But it’s never embarrassing to try.
The scariest thing is we can’t control a collective future. No one person can change the world by themselves. We only have power over ourselves and our futures.
Resilience is being able to successfully adapt to life’s challenges with behavioral and mental flexibility, as defined by the American Psychological Association. It’s crucial to living a meaningful life in an uncertain world.
It instills a fire in you that motivates you to keep moving forward despite a harsh reality.
Being resilient means living your life with the purpose of continuing on. By doing so, you can help change what clouds the future.
Living becomes art through resilience. As you carve out your place in society with intentionality and well-realized ideals, you paint your presence on the canvas of the world. The greatest act of resistance against something that wants to keep you down is to keep moving.
We need to create. We need to speak, write and build experiences with each other. We need to live in a way that adds to our future rather than live to keep it in place.
Maybe we won’t find the solution to economic crises and environmental issues on our own, and that’s OK.
Resilience doesn’t mean forcing yourself to ignore the hardship of it all. It means being kind during times when you feel the most hopeless.
The only way we can reintroduce hope into our lives is if each of us starts doing so little by little. Our combined hope will light the way through the continuously flowing fog of despair.
Andres Arguello is a UF English and psychology senior.
