Last year, I read in SAGE’s journal of health psychology about research projects that revolved around purpose, work, success, and overall fulfillment from life. I found a salient pattern: Subjects who had high levels of “purpose” in their lives or careers also had sleep health and willingness to make healthy choices, which leads to a longer life. Personally, I assess purpose by using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory in psychology first proposed in 1943. It prioritizes everything from basic physiological necessities to advanced social desires like belonging and esteem. However, the idea of purpose over a long-term, decades-long life can become blurry and abstract for a high school student at Parker.

Even an excelling student may come across as confident, cocksure, and gregarious, but the reality is that a successful person can have a sensitive soul, and be damaged and unsure of their place in the scheme of life or philosophical reason of existence. Alterations or unexpected twists and turns on the way to the college of your dreams can paint a stark outlook on the world.

For instance, when I was in middle school, I watched my sister go through the college application process at Parker, and it was not glamorous. For the longest time, members of my extended family would ask if she would go to Stanford like her father. Even though these interactions were seemingly small, they took a toll on my sister. I could tell that she had grown sick and tired of having her buttons pressed for years: being asked about college, living up to expectations, and being plagued by ruminative thoughts day and night while simply trying to be a teenager. And that all happened before decisions came out. It is a shame that an integral part of the development of the world’s youth — college admissions — can loom over students and dominate every ounce of their consciousness.

In the United States, access to higher education is has been increasing. More students are trying to squeeze themselves into the limited seats of selective colleges, an accomplishment that would seemingly make his or her chronically stressful high school experience a tangible one. Consequently, as the number of students applying to selective universities increase, the acceptance rates of these universities decrease.

In 1988, Ivy League school Columbia University had an acceptance rate of 65 percent. Currently, their acceptance rate is a mere seven percent, illuminating the frenzy that students and parents experience while applying to colleges. With the human population, college enrollment rates have overall skyrocketed from 26 percent to 41 percent over the past three decades as students from all over the world come into the United States for their education. The class sizes have hardly changed.

This competitive environment created for high school students implores them to believe that they need to stand out in order to be accepted because education is now shown as more of an elite luxury than anything else. The selective universities have developed a highly subjective method of determining who they want to fill their classes. They use race, gender, income, and legacy as a means of creating a diverse and well-rounded class. Rejecting students merely based on trivial characteristics such as those can be detrimental to his or her mental health and can cause anxiety, chronic stress, depression, and even suicide.

I have seen too many students mull through the hallway like cattle, reconciling the hard truths that I already know. You can almost see the impositions that loom over their heads. It pains me to have to navigate through so much pessimism. Students need more encouragement to follow what they are truly interested in and to stop comparing themselves to peers. The pressure that is currently afflicted on high school students hurts them a lot more than it helps them, especially in a high-performing meritocracy like the United States, where tragic failures or even average people can stick out like sore thumbs.

So I will leave you with this: purpose in life must not be entirely influenced by only our status or statistics, work ethic, discipline, intellect, humor, attractiveness, or likability, but also our interests because those interests alone make you a valid person. Interests are also what make life worth living. Without a healthy dosage of pleasure, you are nothing more than an empty corpse, trudging through the logical steps of life. No matter who you are, it is hard to know where you are going if you do not know where you have been and where you have come from, so I encourage anyone who reads this article to think of your passion and to pursue it because no one has the right to hold that against you.