Swatties love to make promises. Whether it is promising that you will go support your friend at their game, read over a classmate’s essay, or finish your homework before midnight, we are all constantly making promises both to ourselves and to others. The problem is we aren’t very good at keeping them.
It is not that we are maliciously promising to do things that we know we cannot do. We genuinely think that we can do it all until we can’t. A combination of not wanting to say no to anyone and thinking that we can do everything has led most of us to overcommit.
It starts small, skipping one item on your to do list for the day, or promising yourself you will get it done tomorrow or this upcoming weekend. Maybe you get part of it done, but eventually something drops. This is usually at the very last second, not wanting to admit to ourselves before we have to that we misjudged what we could do. We send a hasty apology note to the friend, classmate, or professor and move onto the next thing on our inevitably long to do list.
This overcommitment culture goes beyond just the student body population to the professors and the administration. Professors promise they will get your paper back to you next class, which turns into next week, or two weeks. The administration promises that the Pittenger-Palmer connector will be done by the weekend, when in reality it is going to take two weeks. This leads to ramifications across the college. There’s always someone else suffering the consequences of unkept promises.
This community needs to take a step back and do some self-evaluation. When we unintentionally make empty promises, it decreases the weight our promises hold in the future. As we slowly get accustomed to making excuses for our broken promises we also become accustomed and desensitized to seeing other people exhibit the same behavior. How can we fault our friends for bailing on dinner when you bailed the week before? When you turn your paper in a few days late, it is only natural to accept it back a few days later than when the teacher originally promised for it to be back. It’s far too easy to condone these kinds of broken promises from the administration when we ourselves are so accustomed to doing it ourselves.
While it is extremely important for students to engage with the administration if we want to see any lasting change, it is unsurprising that students choose not to because of the way we fail to follow through. It is difficult to have a conversation to make an impact when both sides are accustomed to shirking responsibility when we inevitably overcommit. As we dive into midterms, we as a community should be conscious when committing to things, in an effort to practice self care and also change our expectations of promises in order to move forward collaboratively to enact real change.
