 Hi, trigger warning. I started googling depression statistics for Gen Z. Why did I do this? You may ask, what the heck does this have to do with gap years in America? You may be wondering. Honest answer everything. It has everything to do with it. 37% of Gen Z adults report being so stressed about the pandemic that they struggle to make basic decisions. 50% struggle to make major life decisions. 79% report experiencing behavior changes due to stress. Also, I don't know if this is right, but I read another article. Disclaimer. Just getting these things from the internet, so it could be very wrong. Only 3% of Americans take gap years. So you may have clicked on this video because you think that taking a gap year is going to be a waste of your time. What if I told you that you should waste your time? I'm gonna do like some fun like little teacher like rhetorical questions for you, so just bear with me. Have you ever wasted your time intentionally? Have you ever spent time doing absolutely nothing without feeling guilty? Or without doing that thing where like you go on your phone for like four hours and then you just end up feeling worse about yourself because you were just like trying to make yourself you're in your brain busy but then it just like you ended up doing nothing but like it was just like a terrible doing nothing's you actually just feel more stressed out and tired than before. Because same. So I was talking to a new friend the other night and you were talking about my gap year because it's a topic that has come up a lot in the past week. If you don't know who I am, hi. My name is Katie and in 2020 when the pandemic hit, I was a sophomore in college and I took a gap year and I made a YouTube channel about it. And then last year I studied abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland for the year and that was what I was originally planning to do in 2021 but obviously that didn't happen. And I just got back to the United States like three weeks ago four weeks ago and I am like fully back to college. I'm a senior in college now. Yeah I was having a conversation the other day with a new friend and we were talking about gap years and about how people viewed kids who took gap years in our graduating high school classes and we talked about everyone just kind of thought they were like lost. They sort of... I'm just gonna like rip the band-aid off. Like that is sort of the stigma around kids in America who take a gap year. Unless you're like sometimes like kids will take gap years and it's like oh they're going to travel and like that's like so esoteric and like they're so interesting. But like the general for most of us who like aren't doing that, if you take a gap year in America it's very much like why are they doing that? What they must be very lost. Something's wrong with them. Am I right? I think I'm right. When I was navigating the college process in like 2018 to 2018, it was so stressful and I knew what I wanted to major in. I always knew what I wanted to major in and the older I've gotten the more I realized that like I was no more lost than those kids who wanted to take a gap year. Not at all. I can actually guarantee you that half the people sitting in your like proclaimed major in college are wondering if they should be there at that particular moment. Everybody is just constantly wondering those things. Unless you aren't, I just like find that hard to believe. I think maybe some people just like no I don't but I think a lot of us don't. Okay but all of the gap year content that is online very much revolves around not always. I'm generalizing. It revolves around it being a resume builder like deep side right? That's just can we just have one thing not to be for our resume and for our future job and for our futures and for productivity and for I want to talk about how misguided this interpretation of the gap year is and I think that it's just like marketing it's just like one of those things that we tell people like so they'll do thing they're like oh it's really good for your resume and honestly that those terms are really boring to me. So we're going back to that question of wasting your time right? Let's waste your time. I think a gap year is a chance to reset your intentions, build a tool belt for life and to like refall in love with learning because I think that the way that our high school and college is set up is a way where we are constantly like pumping out work so that we learn how to be good at work and I think in our culture we get very good at being productive. We get very good at multitasking handling a lot of tasks at once but we don't really often ask ourselves whether a task is worth doing. To give you an example, because I went and I lived in the UK last year one of the most common conversation topics among the other Americans was we were always talking about how stressed out we were that we had so much free time because if you go to the UK you you have like maybe like three four five hours of class a week and the rest of the time you're just supposed to like read um for a lot of us we were like no where's the hustle like what's the problem and now that we're back and we're back to American style learning I was literally just texting my friend about this hey Teresa she's like in all my videos she was actually a subscriber turned friend she was texting me and she was like I don't even have time to eat anymore and that is honestly how I have been I have been like treading water the past three weeks trying to get all this stuff done and I don't even know how I did it before to be quite honest because I'm like trying to do everything with the purpose and like I like to live my life with purpose and to give energy to all these things but like I'm just doing so many things I'm so tired I am so tired but I'm working my way back up to that miracle stamina hell yeah I don't know if this is this has ever happened to you guys but like doing nothing I never do nothing like before my gap year I was always doing something right always doing homework or you know doing things that like were deemed productive I think we're very much obsessed with like productivity I think I've even made videos like that like it's very much like it's that thing like that girl like she's always productive she's always going to the gym eating healthy you know like doing all these things to be productive and I think when the goal is to be productive like we get lost we get lost in that I think it's just like one of those words that we've used too much that it's lost its meaning I remember having the experience moving to the UK and I was talking about how I was so busy one day and somebody went oh I'm so sorry I was like sorry um just because being busy is not like a cool thing like it is here because people say like you're busy here and people are like oh my god like me too queen like I'm so busy even if you're not busy like it's just you want to seem busy if that makes any sense being really busy is like kind of terrible like sometimes it's nice but also sometimes it's nice to do nothing going back to like those initial statistics that I talked about you know pandemic man ah that derailed a lot of us in a real way and I think it really left a lot of us feeling very confused as by these numbers from the internet that I think are real I just think that if more people realized that it was okay to slow down and it's okay not to have everything figured out and it's okay to take things a day at a time instead of five years down the line you know a gap year can be a really grounding experience and wasting a bit of your time and if you listen to yourself and you tune into like that inner voice that you have it can really point you to the direction that you were already going but you just maybe were too afraid to say it out loud or maybe just seemed too big or maybe you really didn't know and you've come to the conclusion that it's okay that you don't know and you can just take little steps day by day to get somewhere that you like I think that we've just forgotten how to be young and like how to actually connect with other people and look them in the eye and have a conversation with them and not who we think they are which I know is really hard to do but I think putting yourself out there you know by challenging yourself to travel or to try a new thing or to embarrass yourself honestly that was a really big part of me and my gap year is I needed to learn how to put myself out there more and I just kind of did it by like exposure therapy like I just I just like talked to a bunch of people and did embarrassing things like like yoga in public oh my god I went to weightlifting it's so gross of me turns out I like it I started a youtube channel which is a lot of work it's a lot of work but like it's work that I really love and it's work I like doing and I think it's something that is worth my time maybe I'll make a video too about like how to do nothing because like it's kind of great I take naps now couldn't be me a year ago couldn't be me I read for fun no like I no like I genuinely do that yeah if you like this video subscribe I post new videos every week Monday I think right now it's Monday right now the day change is based on how busy I am because um senior year is really just like slapping me across the face with um violence I wish you guys all the best of luck in your decision and if you have any specific questions I'm probably going to be doing a Q&A video this this topic actually came out of one of the Q&A questions that somebody asked so I just like kind of inspired this this little thought this little conversation that I wanted to have with you guys thanks for watching