Last week, as I was whiling away time between classes, I came across a review of the documentary film Examined Life. The title references Socrates, who stated, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The film follows eight philosophers as they talk about provocative philosophical questions. “It takes tremendous discipline, it takes tremendous courage to think for yourself,” Cornel West says at the beginning of the preview. Intrigued, I looked into where it was playing. It will be shown in only three upstate New York theaters, and one of them is the Cornell Cinema.

Cornell Cinema, tucked away at the bottom of The Straight, is just one of many underappreciated gems on this campus that can help one lead, well, a life worth living. I’ve always loved the cinema — Such range! So convenient! So cheap! — but the other facets of intellectual and politically engaged life on campus have come to my attention more slowly. The recent surge of women and gender-related events around campus has been particularly inspiring. Just this past weekend, for example, there was a conference on transgender theory, performances of The Vagina Monologues, the first annual summit on international women’s issues and a black box play about Latina women, just to name a few. Such events point to a general climate of investigation on campus. But do these things really make an “examined life,” and why has it taken me so long to get into an examining groove? Perhaps I lacked West’s discipline and courage. Perhaps the notion of a “groove” is antithetical to the unpredictability of discovery. A big part of it is, I think, how a person like me approaches the notion of free time.

I remember, when I was looking into colleges four long years ago, being introduced to the saying “work hard, play hard” on a campus tour. These libraries are full during the week, my tour guide explained, but on the weekends students really let loose! She didn’t say it explicitly, but both parents and prospective students knew what she meant: these students work hard to get good grades, but in the time left over they drink — MTV Spring Break-style. Cornell has its share of this mentality, too — scarcely a night goes by that Collegetown sidewalks aren’t graced with the presence of blank-eyed bouncers and blacked-out students. When I got here, I did not exactly join those ranks, but I did share the notion that what you did for class was isolated from everything else you do. What I did during my free time was what really made my life colorful and unique to me, while class work, though interesting, was for keeping up the ’ole GPA.

This notion led to inner turmoil about how best to spend my free time. Filling all my time with class work was out of the question, no matter how hard my professors tried to do it. But the thought of all that pending work put a lot of pressure on the time spent doing other things. If Saturdays were not for work, I thought, they better be for something pretty damn good.

Expectations were high; results were disappointing. The commonly prescribed campus solution, drinking until I vomited, wasn’t my cup of tea. I was involved with some organizations, which was nice but lacked a certain spontaneous, exploratory quality. Also, extra-curriculars could be as demanding and authoritative as a class; thereby replacing free time with work time. Overall, the pressure I felt to do something valuable other than work ended up making my free time rife with questioning and conflict.

Though Cornell’s notoriously ample workload may shorten students’ hours of playtime, it does little to break down the opposition of work and play. The opposition is odd in this case, because we are not talking about work in the sense of physical labor or earning money to pay the bills. “Work” at Cornell is learning. Of course, the pressure to make your achievements look good on paper — that familiar chain of logic that connects the grade on your next test to your potential overall life success and happiness — takes some of the thrill out of it. Perhaps the semantics are part of the problem too. How much nicer it is to say, “I have so much learning to do this week,” rather than “I have so much work to do this week.” Not “I have to write a paper,” but “I have to explain something to my prof.” Regardless, it is self-absorbed to complain about learning when just attending school here is a luxury.

Still, performing an assigned task feels different from doing something of our own volition — even if the nature of your task relegates you to the world of the privileged. This leads to some interesting questions of how an ethic of work and productivity shapes the way we spend our free time. Leisure activities are often a way to spend money while ceasing to think — vacation packages, tanning and the aforementioned Collegetown drunks come to mind. We know this, or we wouldn’t call certain things “guilty pleasures.” Confessional connotation aside, the term refers to a more extreme example of a wasteful erasure of intelligence, in which we can admit to indulging from time to time, but perhaps we shouldn’t.

If you look at Cornell from a certain angle, it can be a kind of a playground of the mind. If you look at it from another, it’s gray and cold and lonely — but that’s not what this column is about. We are in a place where an examined life is perhaps more within reach than at any other time in our lives. This is not to say that the way to lead an examined life is to go to the movies or to a conference. It is not enough to attend The Body Project or The Vagina Monologues, what is really important is your response to such productions. If both contained feminism of a sort, what kind of feminism and was it smart? Who was it for and whom did it ignore? What you do both in classes and between them, both in your brain and outside of it, is important. Think about it, and get back to me after spring break.