This summer, Jonah Koech won the 2025 men’s 1500m US championship. In his post-race interview, the reporter asked him how he trains so hard without destroying his body. Koech responded, “I eat. I sleep. I work out. And I watch movies. Nothing else. That’s it.” Koech alludes to something which is deceptively difficult: not doing much outside of the one thing you do well.
I told a friend I was going to write about how hard it is to not do much. He called my idea “out of touch” and told me it is actually very easy to lay in bed all day. But I think Princeton students would agree that choosing what to prioritize is hard. In college there is endless possibility. You can get involved in anything you want, so it is tempting to do as much as you can. Committing to a couple things to do exceptionally well, at the expense of everything else, is quite difficult.
This semester, I have tried to imitate Koech’s monkish-ness. I eat. I sleep. I run. I read for my classes while lying in bed. (And I do also get out of bed and go to class.) I credit the best cross country season of my life to this discipline.
Lately, I’ve been considering discipline in the context of Max Weber’s Iron Cage, a concept discussed in my sociology classes. The Iron Cage is a pessimistic characterization of modern life in which we trap ourselves by focusing entirely on efficiency and productivity. Weber suggests the Calvinists created this Iron Cage when they applied their religious asceticism to their work. The Calvinists set a new standard of production which the rest of society, if they wanted to remain economically competitive, was forced to match.
This dynamic of being forced to match a newly raised bar describes what has happened to NCAA distance running over the past decade. The times which used to win national championships will no longer qualify you for the race. You can longer be halfway committed and be competitive.
The Iron Cage can also describe most academic, pre-professional, and extracurricular activity taking place at Princeton. We feel that we must go all in on something, or we won’t be good at it. You put a group of talented, driven people together, and the group adopts the mentality and strategy of the person who is best at that activity. As the groups discovers more about how to get good, their processes become streamlined. To get good, there are no decisions, no creative processes, just steps to follow. According to Weber, this bureaucratization led to life’s “disenchantment.” Our competitiveness traps us in an Iron Cage. We cannot do things which don’t contribute to our goals.
I don’t mean to say that college requires caging yourself. In fact, allows us to forego being caged for four years. When we enter the “real world,” there is a cage, which the Calvinists long ago chose for us, from which we cannot opt out. But in college we have the luxury of choosing how much to constrain ourselves. Do we want to commit deeply to a couple of pursuits, or explore a wide range of activities and experiences? Society encourages college students to explore, and many Princeton students explore endlessly. When some of my friends tell me all the things they do, I am in awe. I struggle to believe that their days contain the same number of hours as mine.
With my running pursuit, I have chosen depth over breadth, and I am happy with my choice. Sometimes, I am compelled to do things I otherwise wouldn’t. There are rainy mornings when I wish I didn’t have to go run, and nights when I wish I didn’t have to go to bed so early. But most of the time I like my cage. It frees me from indecision—I wake up every day knowing what I have to accomplish. Plus, my cage contains a lot of good. It has my teammates, who are my best friends; it has Princeton’s gorgeous countryside where I get to go run; and it has the slow-burning satisfaction of getting better at something.