Something I’ve noticed in the past few weeks is how college students seem to be in an endless battle. This battle is not one of grades, of sports, or anything of real consequence, but instead to hold the title of the “busiest student.”
One of the most common conversations I hear is how busy everyone is, especially now that midterms have just passed. While having a conversation about stress can be effective, it has been turning into a competition. A competition over something that students should be bonding over: being busy.
We’ve all heard students in different majors arguing over who is the busiest (spoiler alert: everyone is busy in different ways - so stop arguing about that), but even students in the same major are constantly trying to top each other with work. If one student has one paper to write, someone has two papers. One student has to read fifty pages by Monday, another has hundreds to read by tomorrow. Someone has to learn two monologues, another has three monologues and a song. It never ends!
Why do we do this to each other? It makes all of us seem petty and unsympathetic. It's as if people who have fewer assignments than us don’t deserve any sympathy because they aren’t dealing with the same thing as "I" am: similar to telling someone they can’t be depressed because someone else in the world has it worse than them.
College students are always in competition with one another whether it’s to have the best grades and graduate at the top of their class or to have the best work to show in class. These things are positive and something that should be celebrated. Why then are we trying to glorify stress?
My guess is that society today places a lot of responsibilities on young adults, especially students. Whether it’s high school or college, if students aren’t doing everything they can and then some, then they’re wasting their time. So, we’ve taken to creating a competition out of being busy because we don’t want to seem lazy. Many of the problems also stem from the fact that extra-curricular activities factor into stress, sometimes more than the classes themselves. In my generation especially we were told by school counselors to join extra-curricular activities because it would look good on a college resume. Now, in college, we’re told to join as many clubs as possible because it will look good on a resume. We have to be busy at all times. Stress is seen as such a common problem in students that, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Anxiety disorders are one of the most common mental health problems on college campuses,” effectively replacing depression as the previous number one entrant.
In a way, by continually trying to top one another about who has the most stress, we’re almost glorifying being busy. We look at students who have heavy schedules and praise them, even when they have multiple break downs, while we look down on those who dare to have free time to do something that isn’t related to school work.
Next time someone says that they’re busy, don’t try to compare how busy you are with them. Give them a shoulder to lean on, and let them know that they can get through it. Stop the glorification of being stressed.
