The Culture of Stress

At Stanford, I hear, they do it differently. They just don't talk about it. Hiding their notebooks and problem sets under beach blankets, Stanfordians tan and surf and play all day long, making sure everyone else sees what a wonderful, effortless time they're having.

But when the sun sets and the surfers head home, there's a transformation. The welltanned pseudo-slackers run for the libraries, sneaking in as much studying as they can before the morning sun finds them at work. Getting caught studying is unsightly, a sure sign that the overachiever is, no matter how hard he or she cavorts and parties, a downright nerd.

At Harvard, of course, we don't pretend. We wear academic misery with honor. There's something about this place--maybe the homely red brick, or first-year parties, or the aesthetics of the Leverett Towers--that turns even the most West-Coast-minded students into brooding New Englanders.

Let's think about this. Harvard was founded by Puritans, and Stanford was founded by Californians. There's a difference.

Can a small band of religious schizophrenics really be responsible for 357 years of secular schizophrenics? Yes. Simply put, the Puritans rocked.

But more important than their theology was the utter failure of their mission. They came all this way from England to find freedom and peace, to build a colony of compassionate, introspective souls.

Not unlike the experience of a green first-year who's come halfway across the country to study at Harvard, the paragon of the American intellectual community. Here, they've heard, are souls interested in articulating their passions, in sharing their ideas--a community, in the words of Henry David. Thoreau, which sucks the marrow out of life.

But instead, everyone's too busy to think straight. There's no reason to tan in the morning and slave away in the libraries at night. Our fate is predestined--we get to work.

That's what we tell ourselves anyway. While one of America's greatest cities rages just across the river, we Harvard types have insulated ourselves within our own culture of stress. And at the risk of sounding like a woozy social studies concentrator, here's how it happens.

Your very first section. Sometime in mid-September, you sit next to a senior who's read only three pages for her thesis. And after you tell the class your name, dorm, and reason for taking the course, the veteran senior turns to you. These will be the first words you hear from someone to whom Freshman Week is but a distant folly: "You're a first-year? Lucky. [Sigh.] Don't ever become a senior." You're probably too shaken to ask how anything at Harvard could be worse than Freshman Week; if you do ask, you'll get the litany of stress--fellowships, thesis, job search, and social life. But from the start you've got a sense of what's in store for you, and you start to expect the worst.

In your first section you also learn the rudiments of cynic-speak. Thinkers don't have ideas--they have "notions." Notions are safe and don't aspire to significance. "Freud's notion that people have primal notions is an interesting notion."

Your very first party. Freshman Week doesn't count. It probably happens in November, when the upperclass students finally get around to throwing the first party of the year. People stand in corners and ask each other about The Reading. They compare TFs. They get drunk and discuss possible future thesis topics.

Your fashion sense. You used to laugh at duckboots. After the puddle in front of Wadsworth House ate your suede boots, you made an emergency trip to Freeport, Maine. There's no use in trying to look effortless and easygoing in a city that has snow in May.

Your connections to the outside world. You once got letters from friends. But you've been too busy to write back. You subscribe to the J. Crew catalogue so that something will fill your mailbox besides letters from Ed McMahon, but you forgot the combination to your box months ago.

Your house dining hall. Here the culture of stress finds its greatest expression. You meet your friends twice a day to bare your most intimate souls. But your soul turns out to be not very intimate at all. You talk about your day, your reading, your TFs, your prospective thesis topics. You feel like you're partying, so you go upstairs to get back to work.

You start to read everything as a text. This primarily afflicts humanities and social science concentrators (though physics students, I imagine, might start to see closing doors and rolling chairs a little differently, too). You deconstruct dining hall conversation. "But when you said you desired more spanikopita, what was the referent?" You start to speak in paragraphs; you wait your turn. A friend at the head of the table starts calling on people. You bus your tray and get back to work.

Everything after that. Everything after that starts to get on your nerves, too. Even your school's newspaper turns life into a stress case. The governor of the state isn't Bill Weld. He's William F. Weld '66. Whenever you turn around there's someone above you who lived in your house when he was here, who ran the organization you've devoted your life to while she was an undergraduate. It's unnerving.

Henry B. Adams '58 (1858, that is), in The Education of Henry Adams, described his time here like this: "The school created a type but not a will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped...It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile."

There's hope for us yet.

Michael K. Mayo '94 is writing his English thesis on the Puritans. Can you tell?