It’s that time of year when many of us are hearing back about the summer jobs we’ve applied for, and many others are scrambling, realizing we haven’t sent out any applications.

It’s a tricky situation because we’re old enough to know we should probably spend our summers working or landing internships related to our fields of study, but we’re also young enough to remember what it was like to have the summers free of school, full-time jobs and an excess of obligations.

So what should we do? Be the proactive adults we’re being trained to become, or be the present-enjoying human beings we were born as?

If you think too much about the future, you sacrifice the experience of living in the present — and that’s all there really is. Those internships you’re dreaming of, set in some future a few distant months away, only exists at all in the present when you think about it; it’s the same thing with those well-remembered summers of high school days.

If we spend too many weeknights researching firms and companies and hospitals at which to have a happy summer, we might get too distracted and lose that happiness in the present.

It’s important to be responsible and use our few remaining school-sandwiched summers to get some real experience that will help us figure out what we want to do with our lives after UND. But you just can’t lose sight of the goal of that process — to have a good time.

That’s why you want that dream job, right? But we have to keep in mind that the future — that yet-to-be version of the present — won’t be any different from this present right now, today.

It will be just like this.

There’s not some point in your “grade school to high school to college to graduate school to first job to better job to retirement” plan where you’ll hit a point and think, “Gosh, I’ve made it!”

Our fancy brains make us think these idealized visions of the future exist in some higher plane of existence. But surely you see that this “now” feels no different than last year’s “now” did. I guess the price of gas has gone up, if you want to count that.

So long as we remember, as we’re spending hours online looking for another “awesome” place to email our resumes, that the goal of our applying to these cool gigs is to be able to enjoy a future version of the present, we can avoid the trap of sacrificing the enjoyment of this “now” for the enjoyment of another.

That sounds a lot like spending a sunny day inside so you might spend another sunny day a year or two from now having fun outside.

Will Beaton is the editor-in-chief at The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].