The most alarming thing that I've realized since coming to college is that stress culture is alive and real. There's a toxic notion that success requires putting people down and pushing them to their limits. Sitting around the dinner table and you hear people comparing the amount of sleep they received the past night as if the person with the least hours is a winner of sorts. The library is no longer a place for people who love their books and their quiet time. It's a place where people try to one-up each other with the amount of coffee they've consumed and how many breakdowns they've had since leaving the cafeteria for lunch. All of this amazes and concerns me, the lengths that we go to pushing ourselves over the edge to claim the title of the most stressed student on campus.
I often find myself caught up in the idea that I'm never doing enough. I feel guilty when I go to bed early on weeknights. I struggle to understand how people go to classes, participate in tons of activities, maintain strong social lives, and are still relatively sane while it takes me hours to fully comprehend just a few readings for my political science class. I am bombarded with questions about where I want to go on study abroad, where I want to intern, what I want to do my senior thesis on, and where I want to be after I graduate. Meanwhile, I'm still stuck in transition, trying to wake up in the mornings, trying to decide what to eat for dinner with a fluctuating appetite, and trying to keep in touch with my family and friends from home.
Everything has become a giant competition. Who is the most sleep deprived, who is the busiest, who is the saddest, who is the angriest, you name the emotion or the task that you're struggling with and I bet you'll find a group of people willing to stack their struggles against yours. In an environment where people could be sharing and listening and empathizing with one another, people are playing the pain game like it's an Olympic sport.
People define success differently. People define happiness differently. People experience stress differently. People experience pain differently. Nothing good ever comes from trying to rank these things because at the end of the day our individual experiences are all uniquely felt. Invalidating other people only pushes us further and further apart.
I'm sick of feeling inadequate for my personal preferences and experiences, and I'm sick of feeling the need to compare myself to others. We all come from different backgrounds, and we all have different emotional capacities. I've learned a lot of things in college so far: how to take better notes, how to study for psych exams, how to structure papers and talk to professors, but if I've learned anything it's that the stress culture endangers our mental health and our human connections, so we need to be talking about it.
