A Dream Deferred

My 7th grade English teacher (bless her beautiful soul) introduced me to this poem. I didn’t have a good grasp of poetry at the time, nor have I attained a proper appreciation of it now, but I remember being uniquely struck by the phrase, “a dream deferred.” Writing it as “a dream when deferred” or “a deferred dream” somehow entirely robs the phrase of its aura, and I honestly still don’t understand why this is the case. I’ve never seen anything like it. I fiend for phrases like these, little artistic flourishes that intentionally break the rules with such masterful grace and unbothered ease, and so it’s stuck with me all these years.

For a little over a week now, I’ve been sick (I tend to be ill on the order of weeks, rather than days, and it’s horribly debilitating), and when I’m sick, I unfortunately lose all sense of discipline and fail with abandon. What that basically means is that this past week, I succumbed to the fatal sin of the modern world: Instagram Reels.

My particular instantiation of the Instagram Reels algorithm is a rather unbecoming chimera of anime/brainrot/looksmaxxing edits, grotesquely muscular men, and the occasional motivational video. The latter in particular has started to dominate my feed recently. This, alongside a slew of many other small events in my life recently, has brought me back to the idea of a “dream deferred.” I’ve not seen the poem in over five years now, but the phrase just bubbled up in my head earlier this morning. And I feel that it so perfectly encapsulates the growing sense of impatience I’ve been having recently.

Stanford was never supposed to happen. Up until junior year of high school, my purview of the best outcome of my life was something like “do computer science at a good UC, become a SWE at Google Irvine, start a beautiful family with the love of my life, and do some cool and impactful stuff outside of that.” Stupidly enough, the first (and probably one of very few things) that adjusted this perception of my life potential was when I did well on the SAT. I genuinely decided to take it “just in case it went well”, and when it went well, I was like, “Well… I guess I’ll apply to other schools too then.”

Since I didn’t want to be too far from home, and I knew that I cared a lot about nice weather, this basically meant that all I did was add Stanford to the list. My application was barely UC-worthy (and my success in UC applications reflected that…), let alone Stanford-worthy, but through a combination of getting feedback from upperclassmen, working hard to weave a cohesive narrative, and getting insanely lucky, I somehow was accepted to Stanford.

High school me never could have conceptualized the life I would be living a few years later, let alone dream it. Stanford has unlocked dimensions of worlds and experiences that I still can barely fathom today. My worldview and life trajectory have been fundamentally shaped by Stanford. High school me would be so proud.

And yet, if you showed my current lifestyle and probable trajectory to the Stanford frosh version of me, he would be… a little disappointed. Not horribly distraught. Just a little crestfallen. And I think that future me would probably feel similarly. I’ve achieved a lot of cool things and had many unforgettable experiences. Things definitely could have gone a lot worse. But things definitely could have gone a lot better, and they could be going a lot better now. And I think I can do things to make life better. If I had to put a number on it, I think I’m probably around 60th percentile across the set of possible trajectories my life could have gone on, starting from day one of frosh fall. Above average, but not anything to write home about. My claim is that I can bump this up to 70-75th percentile if I play my cards right.

I feel like I’m rambling, so let’s get to the point. The point of this post is that I feel like I’m living a life deferred: I have had glimpses of experiences and lifestyles that I want to have, and I think that these things are achievable. It’s quite possible that my internal evaluators for what I really want and what I want to achieve are not very accurate. For instance, being lean and athletic while simultaneously looking massively buff and strong is perhaps possible, but it also probably requires a lifetime of pushing my physical limits. This sounds cool but maybe is not worth the opportunity cost of other things I care about . That being said, I really doubt that I’m anywhere close to any local maxima, so steering myself toward these visions probably does improve my life, assuming I don’t go in multiple directions at once and just end up spinning my wheels in the mud.

I’m getting a little frustrated, because I’m now realizing that I’ve deliberated about this before (part of this post came directly from that deliberation), and most of the issue here is that I have strayed from the plan I made for myself. If I adhere strictly to my plan, I actually would be mostly happy with my lifestyle. Mostly.

There is an issue with the plan that I made, which is that it’s lame. Frankly, this was intentional initially—I made the plan in a “head down, be humble, lock in” mood— but as the quarter went on, I realized that I would very much regret the lack of epic lore in my life, and college is a very special time (especially with the ultra-high density of people my age) to create epic lore. A lot of my “frosh year me would be disappointed” feeling comes from the sense that my life could be a lot more epic while still maintaining grades and other day-to-day activities.

More specifically, the life deferred to which I referred is one of vitality. My conception of vitality is quite fundamental to this notion of “an epic life” and what I aspire toward in general, and I’ve recently begun to identify some of the preconditions for vitality in my life. For the sake of keeping this post somewhat self-contained, I’ll leave these ideas for my next piece.