Brad Olson: The search for the answer

Last year, as I was about to apply for an intra-school transfer from the College to Wharton, I had a pretty nasty epiphany.

It was about 4 in the morning, and I had been cramming with a few friends all night for an Accounting exam. We decided to take a quick break, and one of my friends, Pierre, went to the bathroom. Right after he left, I had what my sister calls a "death scenario." Usually I only have them when I'm meeting someone, or waiting for them somewhere, and they're late.

I always conjure up some wild fantasy to worry about -- what if their plane crashed, or if a MAC truck smashed into them or if they ran into a serial killer at a rest stop? This time, nothing happened to induce the horrific daydream -- only stress, powerful stress and a little late-night delirium.

I imagined waiting for Pierre for a half-hour before going into the bathroom to check on him, only to find him dead on the toilet. He had shot himself.

The scary thing is that I didn't feel bad for him immediately, I just felt angry because I wouldn't be able to keep cramming for my test. I thought I was going to fail because a professor might not excuse me from the exam just because of a friend's suicide.

Of course, when I realized this, I felt terribly guilty and, still, amazed. Before, grades mattered to me, sure, but not especially, not maniacally. But then, after a year spending hours upon hours in the dungeon rooms of Steiny-D late and early into the morning, I thought of nothing else. I probably calculated my GPA. and prospective GPA. five or 10 times a day, always wondering if I would do well enough to get into Wharton, well enough to get an internship, well enough to get an I-banking job.

Beneath all that, though, I was wilting. My future was too knowable, and the known of it felt heavy, unbearable. Life became a drone -- a dulling, homogenous poison. I wanted to quit school and go away, for anything, for waiting tables, for answering someone's phone, for nothing.

Thankfully, I didn't quit, and instead, I wrote a short story. Somehow, as all my depression and yearning and anxiety poured onto each page, I could finally breathe. It was medicinal. Sitting there writing, I knew I couldn't transfer into Wharton. I knew I wasn't even going to apply.

That's not to say that Wharton is evil or wrong or any of those other stupid things, just that it was wrong for me, antithetical to me. Writing is my nectar and, as much as I wanted to be practical, to make a comfortable wage, to have enough for a family once it came, in the end, I could only be myself.

And now that I am busy being myself, somehow, I am still asking the same questions. Pardon all the ruminating, but these are things to think about nearing the end of a semester, an undergraduate career, a transition of any kind. What do I want, and then again, what do I want?

Will it matter, in 40 years, that I did not get to intern at The New Yorker? Will you say, on your death bed, that you failed in life because you did not get an offer from Solomon Smith Barney? We all know the answers.

There are aphorisms all over to help us with these questions, too, things like carpe diem and live and let live and be all that you can be (Army of One, now), that purport to make us think we have an answer, but we don't, and won't.

The answer just isn't wrapped up in a job, or a saying, or a paradigm, or even this valediction. There is no answer to life. It just is, and we just are, and that's the end and the beginning.

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