A few weeks ago, Arts & Culture Editor Chloe Ko wrote an Opinions piece titled “Yearning Is Out, Chasing Is In” (The Oberlin Review, Feb. 27, 2026). In it, she extols the practice of “chasing:” casting aside unnecessary hesitancy and doubt, taking initiative, and making concrete progress toward your aspirations in life.
Obviously, as Ko pointed out, if you are having panic attacks, or any other actual medical issue, don’t hesitate to let your voice be heard. But as a general rule for living your life, I believe this overemphasis on “chasing” can be highly destructive. There are many things that are better when yearned for than when solely chased; still many other things should probably only be yearned for.
In our everyday lives, yearning saves us a lot of energy. If we mindlessly chased our every ambition and impulse, we would soon destroy ourselves — and we do! The third most common object of complaint I hear from other students at Oberlin (right behind the dining hall food and capitalism) is that they are too busy. It seems everyone I talk to has hopelessly overcommitted themselves, stressing themselves out trying to balance work, classes, and endless extracurricular activities with a healthy social life and time for rest. There’s nothing wrong with being especially busy for a little while, and people have different levels of tolerance for this much activity, but it seems like a lot of students have a very hard time slowing down. Spiritually exhausted and mentally drained, they spend so much time “chasing” that they entrap themselves. They stumble from week to week, lost in the maze of their own commitments and woefully obsequious to their densely-packed Google Calendars.
These students could learn a lot from yearners. Sure, slowing ourselves down can come with a different kind of stress and exhaustion. But yearning demands no commitment. Yearning enforces no deadlines, makes no plans, and is directed only by the wandering of our own minds. It is often as much a product of self-control as it is of self-doubt.
Throughout my elementary school career, my teachers constantly accused me of daydreaming when I was supposed to be working. I’m not fully sure what it was about me that made them so convinced I wasn’t paying attention — while I certainly daydreamed like any other child, I don’t remember being any more distracted or withdrawn than my classmates. While I like to think it was my characteristically nonchalant demeanor, it could have easily been my naturally dazed and absent facial expressions. In any case, I was often bothered while working on in-class assignments. My teachers would remind me to do my work while I was in the middle of thinking through my answers, and I would get very frustrated — it looked like I was doing nothing, but the real and important work of whatever division problem or writing assignment was sitting in front of me was happening in my mind.
While my “daydreaming” in class wasn’t exactly a kind of yearning, I believe the tendency of my teachers to expect action, to demand visible and external markers of my progress answering a question, is symptomatic of a larger pattern in modern culture. James Clear, author of the infamous Atomic Habits, put it this way: “Life rewards action, not intelligence.” As a simple description, this could be quite useful in our personal lives as individuals. As a social collective, however, shouldn’t we strive for a culture which values intelligence? Couldn’t we all benefit from taking action a bit more responsibly? Much of our own disdain for yearning is based in this overreliance on action. It feels deeply uncomfortable, almost maddening, to want something and do nothing about it. Yet, it is exactly the overwhelming urge to act which brings about all kinds of social dysfunction.
I don’t believe that “hesitancy, doubt, and longing have become too commonplace” in the world at large. The combination of mass media technology with modern culture, in fact, prohibits it. Is there anything “hesitant” about modern popular discourse? Does the chronically online Twitter user silence their opinions on every piece of news out of “doubt?” Of course not! We live in a time where anyone can have a platform to share their every thought with millions, where an account cosplaying as Bashar al-Assad can fall victim to a “ligma” joke, where insecure, arrogant first-years can shamelessly pour out pretentious, 800-word philosophical diatribes about the value of yearning and have them printed and distributed across campus by the weekend. I don’t have to yearn to know what the masses think of any particular issue; the opinions of millions on every conceivable topic are at my fingertips constantly. All of us are able to ceaselessly chase exposure, prestige, and validation at all times.
It may look like many of our personal and social problems emerge from inaction, but I believe the pervasive and ceaseless fetishization of the “chase” and of often mindless action in modern culture has a much larger and more destructive impact. This week, take a moment to slow down. Notice an impulse and, rather than chasing it, sit with it. Let it ache. The endless pursuit will only exhaust you. It is the moments of silence and inaction between bouts of action that give them meaning.
