The World’s Least Original Commentary on Life

03.01.2026

I write here today somewhat disillusioned as a result of a miraculous feeling of clarity that this weekend has granted me. Every so often these kinds of moments arise out of an instance of intense community. Even though I had limited involvement in the Revue, the magic of the spectacle was all-consuming, as Keenan again showed me the meaning of true community, and how that is the most important thing in life.

One interesting tangent from this weekend surrounds Keenan’s former rector, Bobby Nichols. Current seniors and Keenan alumni praised him, and I saw him at the Revue briefly. Today, I stumbled upon his blog and read a variety of articles that he has written over the years. Many of them concern Christian ideas to which I feel disconnected, but even those entries, along with secular ones, contained a meaningful, genuine engagement with fundamental human realities that I have seldom encountered elsewhere. 

I have a few thoughts after reading 5 or so of his articles:

I recently achieved a revelation that concerns the decision-making process that I have implemented during every inflection point in my life — risk aversion. I have avoided risk so often in my life, retreating to the most comfortable option and, whenever possible, reinvesting into the status quo. This is led to a feeling of dullness where I don’t feel like I have trailblazed, or created something for myself in this life. I attribute this attitude to the environment that I existed in in high school. To “fit in”, I wanted to be exceptional at things that my peers accepted as “worth pursuing”: academics, college admissions, golf, business club, etc.

This understanding has itself provided a great relief to my day-to-day life. It offers a justification for the shortcomings that I have amassed over my two decades on earth. Now when I’m faced with a suboptimal situation — not feeling socially accepted in a particular environment, or not feeling recognized for whatever virtues I feel I’ve cultivated — I can fall back on the reality that, historically, I have acted risk-aversely, an inclination brought about by a naive inability to understand the detriment of that mindset in my adolescence. Faced now with this reality, though, I wonder how do I go about restructuring my life around to be a little less shallow.

One factor that presents a significant issue to pursuing a more free-flowing, independent path is the fact that I have basically mapped out my life for the next four to five years with curricular choices, internships, and other major choices. I’ve basically charted out the least original, least risky path for an ambitious, lucky, and well-off individual like myself. So, while I can have these idealistic thoughts today and fantasize about being something more, I’ll wake up tomorrow with a new set of obligations, and this freight train of a life that I have cultivated will keep chugging toward a tolerant, frankly boring life.

…fortunately, I am optimistic that it does not need to be that way. I am confident that one can make radical decisions that lead toward eudaimonia while existing within the confines of one’s own career, geography, time, etc. I have seen that most clearly through my Uncle Brian. I think also of a former RA in my dorm — while I didn’t know him that well, I am inspired by his trajectory, being President of the dorm, 3x head writer of our dorm’s signature event, pastoral leader in our community (i.e. being an RA), and now a student at a top med school. He is evidence that you can have your cake and eat it too in your life, if you choose to do so. In fact, to think that you need to fit a particular mold to avoid being risk averse is to limit yourself to a subset of pre-determined paths. In my eyes, that is paradoxically acting in a risk averse way. There are, indeed, many ways to skin a cat.

The only reason that I am able to confront these more complex intricacies of the human experience is because of the environment I have been immersed in at Notre Dame. I never had the inclination to question my decisions because I rarely encountered peers who made space for that kind of thinking. My freshman year RA — and my friend group here more broadly — presented a new social dynamic where being introspective was “cool”, not because of some performative display of intellect, but because it allowed for relationships to truly transcend superficiality. That quality is liberating.

I can imagine that many people from home, as well as many people here at ND, might read this and cast judgments on me. I get that. I’ve done my fair share of that. The only reason I am deviating from that perspective is because the circumstances of my life were such that I discovered an alternative way, and I prefer it. Perhaps I will end this piece with a question to insert the kind of ambiguity that surround all these philosophical questions: why is it that I can ever claim superiority of my belief system when much or all of the impetus for having formed that system formulated by chance (i.e. why is the approach outlined in this article not total bullshit)? 

My preliminary answer comes down to a return to the basic, most foundational idea about what it means to be successful in life. It takes one lecture in a Philo 101 class to eliminate money, influence, or fame as exclusive answers. I find the Aristotelian concept of the Golden Mean — or, more intuitively, the concept of balance — to provide the most compelling answer to this question. Contentment comes from having a healthy, rightly-ordered relationship with partying, contemplating, reading, sleeping, and all other components of one’s life. I think that avoiding risks prevents me from developing many of these areas, and therefore deprives me of some level of happiness, hence why I claim superiority to the worldview I have outlined here.