The Knights have returned—not for glory, but to kill the same dragon, high and half-laughing.
Everyone is tired.
Not in the way sleep fixes, but in the way that lingers behind the eyes. The kind of tired that sits beneath conversation, beneath caffeine, beneath even the desire to name it.
One night, I felt it settle in—quiet, heavy, not quite sadness—but something close. I was on the common room couch, high, eating dry cereal out of a ceramic bowl from the dining hall. Someone had put on soft jazz beats. No one was talking. The lights were dim. It wasn’t joy, exactly. But it was the first time all week I hadn’t felt like I was bracing for something. The tiredness didn’t leave. It just softened.
It creeps in quietly. In the pause between inbox pings, in the way a sentence stalls in your throat during section at the moment you open a new tab and forget what for. It’s the weight of always moving toward something—an internship, a fellowship, a relationship that shimmers just enough to keep you chasing.
Days built like scaffolding, every decision propped against the next, angled toward a version of yourself you’ve never met but are expected to become. It’s not just the pressure to succeed. It’s the pressure to mean. To curate a life that reads like a resume before it’s even begun—like meaning is something to present, not something to feel. Like purpose is performative, not lived.
So you nod along. You pick your concentration. You update your LinkedIn bio. You act like the why was answered long ago—because asking it now would mean pausing.
And so, sometimes, we get high.
Not to escape the world, exactly. Just to blur its edges. To loosen the grip without letting go. The calendar thins, the inbox fades to background noise, and time loses its sharpness—no longer something to be divided and spent, but something ambient, like heat.
Weed doesn’t lift you out of your life. It just lets you step sideways—into the negative space between bullet points. Not transcendence, but suspension.
You’re still in the room but slightly to the left of it. Still yourself, but without the tight choreography. It’s a softness the world rarely allows—unscheduled, unscored, slightly out of focus. And for a little while, that’s enough.
And in that softness, hunger arrives.
We call it the munchies, but the word is misleading.
It makes hunger sound like a punchline. A joke in a stoner movie. But that’s not how it feels to me. This kind of hunger isn’t funny—it’s disorienting. It isn’t even entirely physical. It’s something else—a hunger that rises not from absence but from presence. From the way the body suddenly is heard again, how it begins to speak in its own language.
The mouth wants salt. The stomach wants warmth. The self wants anchoring. You find yourself searching the fridge like it might hold meaning.
There’s a quiet absurdity to it—standing barefoot in the glow of the refrigerator, staring at expired condiments and a half-eaten sandwich, trying to feed something—something more than just the body. The edible slows your thoughts just enough to let you feel the shape of the void.
You’re not craving calories. You’re craving clarity. A flicker of something true—not useful, not impressive, just real. A glimpse of meaning that feels like it belongs to you, not your portfolio.
But sometimes, clarity doesn’t come gently.
I got too high once and ended up pacing my room for an hour, convinced I had accidentally designed my entire life around being impressive. Every choice—my classes, my clubs, even the way I dressed—suddenly looked like branding. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t sad. I was just exposed. Like I had finally turned the mirror around and didn’t like what I saw. It wasn’t a breakdown. It was more like a glitch in the narrative. And for a second, I didn’t want to fix it.
At Harvard, we don’t know how to be still unless it serves a purpose. Every hour is scheduled. Every dream must justify its cost. Even rest is commodified—rendered legible as “self-care,” folded back into the logic of utility. Nothing is sacred unless it can be cited. Nothing is enough unless it can be explained.
So when we finally slow down, we don’t find peace. We find uncertainty. The disorientation of not being told what to want.
The University tells us to ask questions. But only within their framework. To innovate, but only toward marketable ends. To be authentic, but not inconveniently so.
And so we perform. Constantly. For an invisible audience, hoping to be seen, hoping to matter, hoping that someone—an employer, a fellowship committee, the idea of the future—might confirm our worth.
And when that confirmation doesn’t arrive? We eat. We scroll. We smoke. We fill the silence with texture. Because emptiness without narrative is unbearable. Even the stoned mind wants resolution.
I once spent twenty minutes comparing the texture of three different granola bars. Not the taste. The texture. I took tiny bites, slowly, like some kind of snack sommelier, trying to decide which one felt most like an answer. It wasn’t about hunger. It was about needing something—anything—to land. To feel sure of even one small thing.
And yet, in the haze, there are moments—brief, fleeting—when something almost makes sense. When I’m high, a bite of food can feel transcendent. A thought loops just right. A sentence lands with weight. The world reveals itself not as chaotic, but absurd—and somehow beautiful in its absurdity.
You think: maybe this is it. Maybe this is the clarity. Maybe the point is that there is no point—and somehow, that feels like freedom.
But it doesn’t last.
The clarity blurs. Edges return. Sobriety creeps in—not as punishment, but as form. Time reasserts itself. The inbox refills. The questions that once felt profound begin to sound indulgent. There is work to do. There is always work to do.
And yet—something lingers.
Not an answer, but a question more fully formed. A trace of the moment when you remembered you were not just a mind attached to a task, but a body, a self, a consciousness adrift in a world that has never quite made sense. A moment when your hunger felt like something honest. When your confusion wasn’t something to solve but to inhabit.
Even our escapes are eventually folded back into the systems we try to escape. Weed becomes part of the schedule. Snacks are optimized. We get high efficiently. And yet—we return. To the high. To the pause. To the question.
Because in a world obsessed with certainty, even the smallest act of uncertainty becomes its own resistance. To sit with longing, without resolving it. To hunger, and not immediately feed. To be unsure and still remain.
Maybe that’s all we can do.
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? – Mark 8:36