Nothing bruises my ego quite like having to admit that my parents were right.

I’ve even gone so far as to write a column advising people not to listen to their parents.

But, unfortunately, they occasionally have their moments.

My parents always tell me, “te estás comiendo las etapas de la vida” — meaning, you’re eating through the stages of life. They typically say this while watching me cram an entire week into a single day, which is reasonable, but I’ve never seen it as skipping through stages.

To me, it just meant making the most of my time and taking advantage of every opportunity that came my way. Everyone moves at their own pace, and I didn’t see any reason to slow mine down.

Because even when I tried to slow down, I would find myself reverting back to my “young ho,” two-times speed ways.

I told her that it’s slightly unrealistic to ask students, especially at UC Berkeley, to stop looking at empty space on their Google Calendars as something to be filled. If there’s a time to be cracked out, it’s now — these are the years we’re meant to experiment, to take advantage of every opportunity and to see what we’re capable of.

I’m young and turnt — now is not the time to slow down. Speed it up!

However, I’ve also come to realize that living at this pace requires knowing when to take my foot off the gas.

A friend once told me that the difference between a great Formula 1 driver and a good one is that a great one has mastered the skill of knowing exactly when slowing down is more beneficial than speeding up.

Once I got used to taking every turn at 90 miles per hour, the thrill became addictive.

I began to crave constant motion. I stacked my schedule with extracurriculars, meetings, absurdly long “lock-in” sessions at Doe Library, anything that made my time feel optimized. I convinced myself that my lifestyle was productive since it felt like “hard work.” Because, at the end of the day, who am I to complain about having so much on my plate when my goal was to eat?

Ironically, it was a video about fasting that challenged my logic.

A friend sent me a video Zohran Mamdani posted, in which a woman named Gazi describes how, during Ramadan, you can spend the entire day craving food and water, only to feel full almost immediately after breaking your fast. It’s almost as if you didn’t spend that whole day dreaming of that very moment.

She uses this as a lesson in the shallowness of instant gratification, which made me realize how uncritically I had been indulging my own impulse to keep reaching for more.

I had spent so much time looking for the next opportunity to take advantage of that I moved on almost immediately when I finally got what I had been working towards. I ended up chasing things longer than I actually enjoyed them, confusing having an appetite for life with mindlessly consuming it.

Soon after watching the video, I realized that being cracked was less about my academic success and more about keeping myself busy enough not to have to sit alone with my thoughts. The back-to-back commitments helped me suppress any emotions that “got in the way” of the work I needed to get done. By distracting myself from the chaos in my head, artificially introducing chaos into my life brought me comfort.

This all ended up catching up to me during my freshman year of college. I spent a lot of time alone, unable to outrun my mind. I tried returning to my usual avoidance tactics, but this time I wasn’t fast enough. I was running in circles inside my head, moving constantly, but getting nowhere.

For a while, I thought I had wasted a perfectly good year of college. I was frustrated at myself for not taking advantage of more opportunities, for letting my thoughts consume me and for not having anything to show for it.

But looking back, it was probably the year I grew most as a person.

I had been so focused on having something to show for my time that I never stopped to consider what I was actually taking away from it.

I once heard that if the only thing you get out of Ramadan is hunger, you did it wrong.

In the same way, if all you got from an internship is being able to post it on LinkedIn, you probably did it wrong, too.

And that’s exactly what my parents were trying to say all along.

“Te estas comiendo las etapas de la vida” — you’re consuming your life faster than you are experiencing it.

Because if you take every turn at full speed, not only will you probably crash, but you’ll also miss everything that made the drive worth it.