In October during my senior year of high school, during the panicked chaos that is the college application process, I was driving home from one of many overachiever meetings. Applications were due in a few weeks, we still needed funding for the literary magazine, apparently I was supposed to take the SATs … my sleep deprived, stressful future loomed in front of me with no escape plan. Suddenly, I had an epiphany and stopped, almost causing a five-car pileup. “Mom,” I said on my cell phone, ignoring the honking cars, “I can’t go to school next year. I don’t care what I do, but I have to take the year off.”

She hesitated for a moment, visions of a strung-out daughter living on a beach in Hawaii and braiding hemp for a living. Then: “OK. If that’s what you want to do, I think it’s a good idea.”

So, after months of college applications and second-guessing, I did it. I sent Cornell my letter of deferral and applied to NATIV, a nine-month gap year program in Israel. I dealt with my friends’ warped fears of Israel being the cause of my inevitable death (still here guys). I argued with many of my teachers, who thought that I was crazy for putting myself a year behind my peers. I reassured my parents who worried that I might never come back. And I dealt with my own hesitations of entering college at 20. I considered all of these logical arguments and rejected them, choosing to follow my gut instead.

There’s this idea in American culture that nothing is of value unless it directly leads to something else. Everything is one step up to the next great hurdle; doing well in high school leads to doing well in college leads to graduate school leads to a great career leads to the financial success and the domestic security we’ve been trained to believe will bring us true happiness. Taking “time off” or, Ezra Cornell forbid, not graduating, is regarded in our society as a huge failure, even though there are so many successful people who took the less conventional route.

Maybe it’s because of the Puritan work ethic our country was founded on, maybe it’s because our parents and grandparents — some of whom are immigrants — sacrificed everything for us to “make it,” and we feel like we owe it to them, or maybe it’s that all-too-human nagging knowledge of our own mortality. Whatever it is, it has turned a great number of us into desperate drones, rushing through each phase of our lives like if we don’t stop to breathe, we’ll lose the race, both against time and against the competition.

As Cornell students, having worked so hard to get where we are, we understand this notion more than most. We live in the library, guzzle gallons of coffee and fight for the best internships. On the weekends, we make partying a requirement instead of a recreation, worried that we’re missing out on something our friends at less intensive schools enjoy. We never, ever stop, making ourselves physically (and in some cases, mentally) sick, reassuring ourselves that at some point, we will be able to sit and enjoy our successes. We repeat this from prelim to final to thesis, making it our mantra until we collapse, burnt out.

I was lucky — for many, taking “time off,” isn’t a financial possibility. Friends of mine who were planning on going on programs much more interesting than mine had to rethink once their respective universities withdrew their financial aid packages. In other countries, however, a gap year is the norm. Gap year programs for Europeans are advertised openly, and most undergraduates are in their mid-to-late twenties. My Israeli friends, for the record, think that even taking one year off isn’t enough. So why are gap years not encouraged in America? Are we that scared that we’ll lose our status as a world power if our youth get a moment to breathe?

Obviously, no one who reads this can now say, “Hey! Maybe I should defer!” I’m preaching to the too-late-to-convert, yes, but this isn’t really about taking a gap year. Our time at Cornell is short. How often do we cut corners for that ‘A’ instead of taking the time to enjoy learning? How many people are in majors they hate, just for a job with a big ol’ paycheck? Being a starving artist isn’t the point, but there has to be a happy medium.

So yeah, go ahead and laugh. I’m a 20-year-old freshman. I’ll be drinking legally while many of my friends are still in their teens. I’m older than many of my R.A.s, TAs and campus-organization leaders, and I bite my tongue because pointing it out makes me look like an ass (and rightly so). People my age will be far into the next stage of their lives before I even graduate. In my heart though, I know deferring was the right decision. Do I know exactly what I want to do with my life? No. Do I have a better idea now? Yes. But at the moment, that doesn’t matter; the future is this bright, amazing entity, full of opportunity that could lead anywhere. And if it doesn’t? Well, I can move back to the kibbutz and return to my old job as a weed-picker extraordinaire.

Julie Block is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at jab326@cornell.edu. WTF, Mate?! usually appears Wednesdays in Arts and Entertainment.