Because the great Mayan gods felt the need to lie to us for the past however many centuries, our lives are now ruined. The world was supposed to end. And we, thinking ourselves quite clever, decided not to waste our precious time on earth suffering through finals and college applications when we wouldn’t even make it to college.

So, instead of scrambling for essay ideas and filling out tiresome applications along with the rest of our classmates, we — actually, I don't know what we did, but we basically decided that anything that required effort was a waste of breath, seeing as we only had a limited number of breaths left anyway.

And don't even ask us about finals. Our scantrons were filled with zig-zags and other aesthetically-pleasing patterns. We spent the allotted time drawing pictures of post-apocalyptic earth on our test papers and testing just how valid the “C” theory was (over 50 percent in some classes!), clearly demonstrating to our teachers that we had our priorities in perfect order.

We haven’t even gotten to the best part yet: We haven’t submitted any apps. The logical question is, “Why didn’t you throw together something after the Dec. 21, once you realized the world hadn’t actually ended?”

We might have been in denial — just a bit. And funny story, we never actually asked teachers to write our letters of recommendation because being the kind old souls we are, we didn’t want to burden them with any more work when all the computers (and colleges) would be piles of dust in a few short months. Our transcripts are in no condition to be sent across the country, and as a matter of fact, neither are we.

Instead of exploding with stress and banging out more than 10 college essays in a mere matter of days, we decided that the fake-pocalypse could serve as a valuable lesson: The world may not end tomorrow, but life’s too short to spend constantly worrying about the distant future.

Watching our friends grow increasingly hysterical over the college is disheartening. All seniors can talk about these days is admission, deferral and rejection.

We don’t feel ready to get sucked into that college-vortex just yet. So, perhaps we’ll take a gap year to get our affairs in order and try again in 2014. Till then, you’ll find us enrolling in some community college courses, summer programs, traveling abroad and spending a little more time with our friends and families. College can wait.

And who knows? Maybe the world will end this year.