Column: Here, There, and Everywhere: Inside the Mind of a Yalie
It is Sunday night, and you are about to become a different person.
Yesterday is over. Saturday is over. There is still a little of it left in you: a low hum behind the eyes, the particular tiredness associated with the alleged degeneracies of the passing weekend. Sunday, meanwhile, is dedicated to recovery, fake-studying, lying down and scrolling. This schedule has been decided for you since the moment you observed the time to be past 3 a.m. the previous night.
Yes, perhaps you wasted a day. But Sunday is famously the day of rest. You rested. A necessary step for what is about to come. Sunday is a prequel. Tomorrow, though, is Monday. And Monday is a regime change.
The list begins assembling itself.
Starting tomorrow, you are going to be locked in academically in a way you have frankly never been. You will not miss a single office hour. You are committing to the gym, and this time making it past two visits. Takeout is over: dining hall meals will contain discernible protein and something green. You will never sleep in your makeup again. You are getting a campus job, applying to every internship remotely applicable to your interests and, while you are at it, probably founding a startup. Or something.
It feels incredible. A rush runs through your body like electricity. You can see her, the version of you who does all of this, and she is not a fantasy exactly. She is more like a forecast. She has a better GPA, her future figured out and, of course, a smaller screen time number. She is, crucially, extremely close. She is one night of sleep away.
The plan has potential. Potential to looksmax and academicmax and socialmax and selfmax. Potential to finally become the most optimized version of yourself.
Then it is Monday morning, and to put it simply: game’s gooooone.
You overslept. You have already missed your first class. You feel hungry and nauseous at the same time. The gym is not even a discussion. The readings, which existed only theoretically on Sunday, have now become a quantity. You open your phone for one quick second to check one notification and resurface from a sea of Instagram reels a great deal later than one second.
You are not, at least, alone. Nearly two hundred economies wake up to their own version of Monday.
Somewhere in my second semester at Yale, sitting in intro macro, I acquired a framework for what was happening to me. It returns in my chuddest hours. Potential GDP is what an economy could produce when its resources are being used sustainably. Actual GDP is what it does produce, and the distance between them is the output gap.
Your actual self. Your potential self. And the gap you spend Sunday nights trying to close.
When an economy is producing below its potential, the gap itself is not the explanation. Economists ask what is preventing output from reaching the level it could sustain. With ourselves, we are much less patient about distinguishing the shortfall from its cause. We see the gap and call it laziness. But a gap between actual and potential output does not mean the potential was imaginary. Something is getting lost between capacity and reality. Obvious when the system is a country. Harder to believe when the system is you.
At Yale, it is particularly hard to believe because there is always someone visibly occupying the life you have scheduled for next Monday. Someone seems to know exactly what they want to major in. Someone already has plans for next summer. Someone has answered every email, is doing a fellowship you have never heard of, calls their family back home every day and, somehow maintains a fantastic social life. Meanwhile, your sleep has been reduced to three or four hours a night. You get twenty-four hours in a day. Somehow, they seem to get thirty.
The temptation is to treat all of this as if it is about you. It is not.
Economies do not share the same production function, and neither do people. They begin with different resources, constraints and histories. The same input does not produce the same output everywhere. Yet one of Yale’s favorite activities is taking somebody else’s output and using it to calculate our own potential.
By Sunday night, you announce austerity.
No more waking up ten minutes before class. No more accumulating laundry on the chair. No more unread emails or meals assembled entirely from snacks or saying “we should get coffee” to people you actually want to see and then never doing it. Every inefficient sector of the economy will be reformed by Monday morning.
Unfortunately, austerity imposed by a government consisting of one exhausted person at 2:17 a.m. tends to have a notoriously low compliance rate by daylight.
Part of the problem is that the Sunday-night version of myself does not always need to change her life. Often, I suspect, she does not even particularly want to. Sunday night has its own particular low: the weekend is over, Monday is approaching, maybe I feel a little lonely, maybe vaguely guilty, maybe just bad without needing a reason for it. What I want, in that moment, is not necessarily deep change. I want the sensation of change. The reassuring feeling that whatever was wrong with this week has already been fixed for the next one. Planning is remarkably good at impersonating progress, and so for a few hours, the output gap disappears without me having produced any output at all.
Actually closing it has been much less dramatic. The things that have moved me closer to the person on the other side of the gap are small habits, repeated badly and inconsistently, but repeated nonetheless. Starting before I feel ready. Doing a little instead of waiting to do everything. And, perhaps most importantly, remembering how much I am already doing, something Sunday-night me is skilled at forgetting.
And not all effort can go toward closing a gap. There is depreciation, too. Things wear down whether you account for it or not, and people are not exempt. Sleep, health, friendships, attention. Some part of your effort has to go toward maintaining what you already have before any of it can become growth. Sometimes that means choosing sleep over the party. Other times it means abandoning the problem set and hanging out with your friends.
The point is not to maximize every part of your life at every moment, but to figure out what needs investment, what needs maintenance and what, for tonight, can afford to be neglected. None of this produces that Sunday-night electricity, but potential output is not the most an economy could produce for one spectacular day if everything ran at once. It is what it can sustain. And potential is not a person I can become for forty-eight hours. It has to survive Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and…