College has become a four-year exercise in saying later. Later, after graduation. Later, after the internship. Later, after the first stable job, the better house, the clearer plan, the version of yourself who finally feels successful enough to relax.
Lives are treated as rough drafts awaiting future completion, as if the present exists mainly to be polished and submitted to some imagined authority of success. Philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-toward-death cuts sharply against this habit. Existence cannot be postponed until one becomes more stable or successful. The life students keep preparing for is already happening.
Heidegger’s philosophy begins from the idea that human beings do not exist like objects. A desk or a backpack can simply sit in the world, but a person cannot live in a stagnant existence. People care about what they are doing, wonder what their choices mean and feel the weight of becoming someone.
Heidegger calls this kind of existence “Dasein” in his book “Being and Time.” In German, Dasein can mean existence or being-there. Heidegger uses it more specifically to describe the human way of existing with the being already placed in a world while having to live out the meaning of one’s own life. Dasein is never a finished self looking at life from the outside, but looks more like a being already involved in possibilities. People interpret their choices through these possibilities combined with fear, memory and expectation.
This makes time central to Heidegger’s thought because human beings are shaped by conditions they did not choose: family, culture, institutions and the expectations of others. At the same time, they reach toward what they might become. A student is shaped by tuition costs, family hopes and job market anxiety while also imagining future identities. Human life is stretched between what has already happened and what remains possible.
College culture takes this structure and turns it into a permanent state of self-delay. Since students are always becoming, they are taught to treat who they are now as insufficient. A class becomes a requirement, a requirement becomes a degree, a degree becomes a job, and a job becomes the condition for finally beginning life.
Heidegger would connect this habit to what he calls the They, the anonymous social voice that tells people what “one” is expected to do. A student does not feel forced by the They, and more often they feel as if they are simply doing what makes sense. They learn to experience the present as evidence for a future self. Every choice has to justify itself before it has even been lived, and the ordinary texture of life starts to seem suspicious because it does not always announce its future value. One chooses the practical major, one stays busy, one feels guilty for being certain and one builds a brand before having a self. The They rarely sounds cruel, instead sounding responsible by speaking through ambition. It is powerful because it makes socially approved life appear identical to a life one has actually chosen.
Being-toward-death interrupts that comfort, but not as a motivational slogan about life being short. Heidegger is pointing to the fact that each person’s life is finite in a way no one else can take over. Death reveals that no institution, parent or public timeline can live one’s life in their place. Finitude forces a question of whether students are living their possibilities as their own or if they are simply becoming legible to everyone else.
The moments created throughout college are not disposable simply because they are unfinished. The conversation that goes nowhere, the book that changes nothing practical, the friendship formed for one class all belong to life itself. The danger comes when preparation becomes the whole shape of existence. A student can achieve everything expected of them and still feel absent from their own life.
A life cannot be saved for later without being spent in the meantime. While you are working so hard to become someone, what kind of life are you already choosing to live? To keep waiting for a final version of oneself is to risk discovering that the draft was never separate from the life, but it was the life itself.
Jacqueline Lee is an Opinion Intern for the spring 2026 quarter. She can be reached at jacquhl3@uci.edu.
Edited by Geneses Navarro
