Do I have to float through life?

This is basically why I wanted to drop out through most of college. I wanted the challenge, I wanted to make things difficult for myself, because I certainly hadn't been challenged until then.

I realized halfway through senior year, when it was nearly too late, that I was being silly. Mostly because I finally realized how hard what I wanted to accomplish in life actually was, and figured that if it's intrinsically that hard, why make it even more difficult on myself? I can challenge myself by working on harder problems, not by throwing up artificial roadblocks in my way.

The way I wished I'd approached college was to treat it as a menu of opportunities, each of which I could sample or gorge myself upon as I saw fit. I did this to some extent, but there's so much more I could've exposed myself to had I made different choices back in high school. Unfortunately, it's difficult to understand just how big the world is and how much richness is out there when you've spent the first 18 years of your life in an institutionalized box with your parents making every decision for you.