One thing that might help: considering whether “keeping up” actually matters. If you come from an underprivileged community, think back to what mattered there. Where did meaning come from, to the people around you? Was it getting food on the table and spending time with family? That’s yawns to a twentysomething, at least it was to me as I graduated from UC Berkeley in the early 1990s… but now I get it. This is the important shit.

UC Berkeley can’t give meaning to your life. Neither can having your work published in prominent venues (though I loved my college experience and I’ve loved much of my writing career). As a writer and a human, you may find that nothing external ever fills that uncertain hole in your center. Someone else will always be more successful than you. It’s not about “oh you have your whole life ahead of you to Do These Ambitious Yet Possibly Meaningless Things,” though you do. It’s more about whether you will find meaning itself gently spreading through the world around you. You can find it in people—lowly everyday people who seem terribly unexciting, with their failure to be in Europe, filing stories with the Times this week. In their actions, the fact that they get up every morning and do the work, their fragile attempts to connect and communicate with each other. In nature, animals, science, spiritual practice. Meaning is everywhere.

One cool thing about having identified some of your own fragility is that you can help others. (Super-confident people who haven’t ever experienced insecurity or the empathy it engenders are called sociopaths, and you don’t want to be one of those, however cool their Instagram feed might look.) Maybe you could mentor a kid at Cal who’s just shown up and is going to be underprepared, like through an organization like one of these: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/nonprofits-stepping-support-college-students-need/ .

So, there you go, a random bit of unsolicited advice from a middle-aged fellow Cal alumna. And remember that Berkeley has been a hotbed of original thinking and radical action in its history. We don’t go to Berkeley to become Success Robots. We go there to learn, devote ourselves to ideas, progress, people, and change. What that looks like in the long run cannot possibly be revealed by a few Tweets in your first year out!