Columbians are in the throes of a liberal middle-class guilt complex, overlaid with an expectation, often self-imposed, that time exists to be scheduled, and that we can only justify our privilege by busying ourselves with achieving everything. This has produced the breakdowns with which we’re all familiar: the friends who seem happily overworked until they have a psychic break, or spiral into depression, or lose all control of their sleep and/or drinking and/or eating habits. Tell us you don’t know one of these people. Tell us you don’t know several. This may not be a universal problem, but it’s prevalent enough to merit attention.
At convocation, they tell us we are the best and the brightest, that we’re here because we were chosen from the multitudes, lifted up from anonymity by the benevolent admissions committee, and set among the “leaders”-to-be at Columbia University. Anyone with a sense of decency starts feeling pretty nauseous. As the praise is heaped on, the incredulity grows, followed by a sense of inadequacy, a sense that we have already failed to meet expectations, that we are surrounded by an intimidatingly accomplished group of eighteen-year-olds. Our thinking becomes skewed in two ways. First, the notion develops that we have to do more, do everything, until we live up to what we’re thought to be. Second, we begin to believe that we ought to be ambitious in the most worldly sense, not taking in a college experience, but urgently preparing ourselves for greatness worthy of the lot we’ve drawn.
As we race forward, caffeine in one hand and Blackberry in the other, we live up to these standards in the way we’ve been taught since elementary school—we schedule. On top of school, we have our internships; our campus political, social, and service organizations; sports; overdeveloped hobbies. There is little of what fellow Columbian Randolph Bourne called “the experimental life”—little free time, little time for casual conversations, little time for spontaneous experience or long wanderings in the city. The pace is heightened by the city itself. The problem lies in how this bounty of opportunity and choice veils unstructured time with guilt.
Of course this pace is unsustainable, yet we attack our supposed leisure time with the same fervor and competitive spirit as our school careers. Taking a break from activities does not mean relief from the drive to excel. We begin to take pride in our ability to “work hard, play hard,” flinging ourselves back and forth between intense work and often intoxicated stupor. Everyone’s favorite bragging statistics—how much they drank and how little they slept—are the twin metrics of our impossible ambitions. Life is not a purposed whole, but a cycle of tirelessly building up our physical and mental capacities before hurrying to obliterate our senses. Could any of this make us happy?
In the frenzy, some of us ultimately reject ambition and face the consequent feelings of inadequacy, while some of us literally push ourselves to collapse. Atomized living arrangements and schedules and perhaps temperament make it hard to notice when someone is slipping. Communal living spaces help prevent this (see: Potluck House, our favorite), but when people live in dorm room boxes and are following their iCal to the next destination, who could notice when they’re starting to lag? Should you suggest counseling, the inevitable response is, “I don’t need that, that’s so self-indulgent, so weak, they must think we’re all so ridiculous showing up there when there are people with real problems.” In the face of genuine unhappiness, we maintain that treatment is for other people, that the frenzy is natural for us, and that we should not take up someone’s time with our pathetic complaints. So we internalize our stress because we don’t deserve help. And Columbia has been kind enough to let us know that we are the best (and we have often been foolish enough to believe it) and even when the best are down, they never say uncle.
Ours is not an ambition driven only by ego, although there’s a healthy dose of that, but one that frequently expresses a liberal ethic. We read our successes as the morally conscionable response to the privilege of attending an elite university. We wouldn’t be engaged in such determinedly manic behavior if we didn’t believe we were ultimately fighting for some larger good and needed our future mastheads to match the Columbia brand. This naive extension of progressive values borders on tragic. In our desperation to prove that we will make the difference, we neuter our ability to do just that. Shock and Awe submit that it wouldn’t kill us to escape the whirlwind. That we might actually be better at saving the world if we experienced it more and dashed around it less. That the true self-indulgence triggered by our privilege is the thought that we are superhuman and that we are somehow different and tougher than average. We’re not, and for your own sanity, don’t let the dean tell you otherwise.
Sarah Leonard is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. Kate Redburn is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and African studies. Shock and Awe runs alternate Fridays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com
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