Malaise of University
The biggest mental health challenge that university students face is the fact that we feel that we are expected to have all our shit together. That somehow, we magically become “successful” the second we graduate. We all have a dream or a vision of what we want, we know that university is a step towards that goal — but in between university and that dream, is one giant blur. Our expectations of what we need to have to be successful is insanely high. In addition, we generally correlate career success with happiness because success = stability = things = more things = comfort = happiness? This ideal of happiness is an endless cycle of searching for happiness, you will always be running and puffing to attain some form of happiness that will dissipate once attained. Not just university students but our society as a whole keeps injecting happiness into things. And things are ephemeral.
Social media plays an integral role in this concept. Our timelines are pretty much an endless list reminding us that we not good enough. At least once a day I find myself asking, “What am I doing with my life??” because I see people my age who already seem to have their life together. I feel like I’m left behind and because I am not like those successful people, I am a failure. The main issue that my friends and I always discuss is our fear of not making anything of ourselves, not making six-figures, not getting married “on time”, not having kinds “on time”, etc. etc. Because we see people our age achieving those things and we feel inadequate — what are we doing wrong? Anxiety and fear of the future is what’s killing our mental health, there is pressure to be great from our families, friends, colleagues, mentors, and the public everywhere we go — in person and online. It’s lured over our heads and we are running, always running towards some kind of goal to hopefully finally say that “I made it.” — to reach a success that is social-media approved.
This is all phony. It’s an embedded narrative our society has conjured. It’s actually just consumerism. Modern society feeds off this anxiety, off the happiness search, through the consumerist cycle: working and shopping, working and shopping, and so on and so on. Throughout this cycle we wait for happiness to arrive. But we loop through these stages without ever finding what we’re looking for. All that this produces is mini ripples of pseudo-happiness; equivalent to an Instagram-post-lifeline, it quickly becomes irrelevant in a few hours. It’s our craving for recognition that enforces this mentality. Success is praise, is recognition that you are doing well. Social media is a platform for recognition. It’s a mentality humans have held forever because recognition gives us status, power, and confidence — a weird recipe humans have formed to reach happiness. Status has always been a human desire until now in the elevated and progressed Modern world, we are still the same group of humans aiming for the same goal, with the same flawed recipe.
The solution, in short, is to derail yourself from this mindset. Strip yourself from this narcissistic ideal to be recognized for your achievements. Achieve things for the sake of yourself, do things because it fulfills you, because it resonance with you. That’s all that really matters. Do things because those things are innate to you who you are and nothing else.
