Agile Living

Seeing this reply reminded me of the dynamics of the Waterloo co-op system. And part of me is kind of sad that I will no longer have a forcing function causing me to uproot and change my life every four months after I graduate.

There are good things that will come out of that, but also there are bad things. Switching every 4 months means that you cut your losses short, so if something isn't working, there's a very clear cut date of renewal where you can leave and stop doing it. Doing something you know you shouldn't be doing, for a long time is the worst thing you can do with your life: wasting time.

On the bright side, if things are working out, you can extend and keep going. This ended up leading me to stay in New York for almost the entirety of 2025, despite moving initially only for a gap term.

The point is that having explicit, renewable decision boundaries is a helpful forcing function. Humans are creatures of habit I think such boundaries help catalyze enough inertia to break out of bad situations.

There's probably a flip-side to this as well. Uncharitably, you could look at this as encouraging a non-committal character. However, I don't know if that's the case. You ideally want whatever you're doing to be something you actively want to commit to every day and say yes to on net.