Welcome to The Phoenix’s weekly digest. Every week during the quarter, you can expect our writers’ takes on some campus happenings.

This week, August Beaudreau discusses the hopefulness of jumping into Lake Michigan in dead of winter.

Ultimately, Kuvia is absurd. Why, at a serious, imposing institution filled with serious, enterprising people, do hundreds of students decide to wake up at the break of dawn, run through the cold winter morning, and plunge into a frigid lake? Don’t you all have problem sets to finish or recruiting interviews to prepare for? Are you not familiar with the term “opportunity cost”? But it’s this sheer pointlessness that has allowed Kuvia to not only endure for forty-three years, but also to cement itself as a cornerstone of our school culture.

UChicago is a place where time looms large. The rigor of academics coupled with the rapid pace of the quarter system makes you feel like every hour of every day has to be put towards an efficient end. This unceasing pressure exists wherever you look. From the couple whose only romance is study dates in Pret to the colorful masterpiece of a Google Calendar you inadvertently glance at on a laptop next to you in lecture, you always get the sense that nobody has enough time. Any moment not spent studying is a moment wasted—you need to operate with maximum efficiency and even then you can never truly be on top of all that needs to be done. To do something pointless is an unaffordable luxury. 

Unsurprisingly, this pressure cooker pushes students to their limit. Scrolling Sidechat on a Sunday evening (a senseless waste of time for you, vital student journalism for me) makes this clear enough. Along with some less palatable content, you’ll see anonymous posters lamenting how they did nothing over the weekend and how “over” it is. These posts are almost always met with sympathy and understanding. Everyone at this school has experienced such moments of despair, where the mountain of work before them appears truly insurmountable within the time they’re given. You’re left berating yourself: “If only I had woken up earlier, if only I hadn’t talked with my roommate for half an hour, if only I had a bit more time.” 

I believe these moments give Kuvia its salience. Through the intensity of the university and the apparent busyness of their peers, UChicago students imbibe the belief that their time management must be perfect. Failure to live up to this internalized expectation is profoundly demoralizing. Yet, we are still young people, and young people (even those dead-set on being consultants, corporate lawyers, and investment bankers) like to be rebellious. What, then, could be a more subversive statement that you still control your time and are free to spend it in a way that you enjoy than Kuvia? 

Rather than hopelessness and despair, Kuvia offers us a joyful embrace of our collective inability to live up to the impossible expectations we’ve been taught to take so seriously. The absurdity of Kuvia allows UChicago students to reconsider how they manage their time and to understand that they need not be optimized, task–completing automatons to be happy and successful. If you’ll never truly have enough time no matter what you do, why not spend a few hours running in circles and jumping in the lake?

Stay tuned for next week’s edition. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts, disagreements, or words of support, we want to hear them! Write to us at thechicagophoenix@gmail.com.