From the Editor’s Desk: Do an Experiment on Yourself

A friend of mine recently told me she’s decided to take a month-long break from smoking weed. 

Not necessarily worried about her habits but inspired by a class on substance abuse, she said she wanted to test her own engagement with the drug by performing an experiment with herself as the subject. 

I instantly became obsessed with this idea of performing an experiment on myself. While I haven’t thought up something as deliberate as a month of sobriety, the framework of purposefully examining my own thoughts and relationships to the elements of life has forced me to think intentionally about my choices and my reactions to those decisions. 

Interdisciplinary Honors Program Professor Christopher Whidden famously tells his students to “run towards complexity,” The Phoenix reported in 2023. I’ve since found the advice to not only be a guidebook for writing an essay, but an instruction on how to live my life. 

Aggravated with lifting in Halas Recreation Center’s basement weight room during what may be the last couple weeks of Chicago sunshine, I challenged myself — perhaps taking Whidden’s advice too literally — to run every day last week. 

It was something I hadn’t done since high school cross country, and I’d convinced myself it was something I wasn’t capable of anymore. The boredom of doing the same motion for 45 minutes every day and the predictable hum of pain I knew I’d feel scared me into stagnation.

But muscle memory is a strange thing. The movement felt more comfortable than I thought it would — though my hips were probably given quite the shock — and the burning buzz in my body silenced my brain in a way I forgot I enjoyed. 

My experiment yielded a few results of note. I liked the struggle, and in it, I found a place to see myself clearly through my capabilities and my failures, facing the things I maybe didn’t want to know about myself, but understanding them nonetheless. 

Olympic gold medalist figure skater Alysa Liu told 60 Minutes struggling makes her feel alive, which sounds like something only a slightly insane world-class athlete would utter, but the words resonate with me. Life without struggle is boring and repetitive, even uncreative. 

This week, I’m performing another experiment: writing for 15 minutes every night without stopping. The idea sounds laughable considering my position at this paper requires near-constant writing, but my typical process involves far more typing and backspacing than I’d care to admit. 

I’m hoping putting pen to paper the good old-fashioned way will glue my thoughts together more cohesively. Maybe it will, or maybe it won’t. The point of the experiment isn’t completely curing my scatterbrain; it’s knowing one way or the other how I operate. 

While it’s ridiculous to expect some sort of profound self-actualization to occur in my senior year of college, I don’t think it’s stupid to dive into the complexity of daily life, thinking deeply about minute details. 

College is nothing if not a place to learn. Why not turn that curiosity inward? Test yourself, learn what makes you tick and bear witness to the results that are often easier to ignore. 

Every week, The Phoenix challenges our writers to look critically at what’s happening around them. Maybe this time, we can investigate ourselves too. 

In this edition of the paper, read about Loyola’s Family Weekend drone show in News, the Renegade Craft Fair in Arts and The Phoenix’s stance on President Donald Trump’s censorship of the press in Opinion.