Dropping the H-Bomb

If someone had asked me before freshman year what I planned to do upon arriving at Harvard, my answer would have been simple: work hard by day, party hard by night, meet fabulous people, be generally fabulous. I was going to live deep. I was going to suck the marrow out of life. I was going to college.

Once on the other side of Johnston Gate, however, things looked considerably different. Instead of engaging in philosophical discourse while sipping mocha in between classes, I stood in line at Annenberg for chicken marsala and stumbled through awkward introductions with my new classmates (Rena Xu; Holworthy; Pittsburgh; Biochemistry). Instead of reaching enlightenment in a stately wood-paneled chamber, I found my way to Cabot Library (“They never showed THIS in the brochures!” my freshman roommate exclaimed indignantly). And far from knowing instinctively where my niche at this large school lay, I treaded uncertainly in a pool of opportunity, clutching colorful flyers from the activities fair like a lingering lifeline to the storybook world of Harvard.

Much to my dismay, all my friends from high school seemed to have adapted effortlessly to their new university settings and were already busy having the times of their lives. Many of them sent out links to online photo albums, vivid testaments to the parties they’d crashed, the circles of friends they’d adopted. Guided by the picture captions, I experienced vicariously the thrills of their new lives: “Laur, Rach, and me~4th floor love!”­— “Me, Laur, Brit, and the group—SO hot right now!!”— “Me and Bryan, we are really drunk lol.” If ever there existed an ideal college life, my friends all seemed to have found it.

So when one friend suddenly left her university halfway through the year to enroll at a local college, I was taken aback. Never before had it occurred to me that there might be more to the story than what I was seeing. I would later learn that in spite of the upbeat entries posted in her online journal, there had been problems—that in spite of the smiling faces and spontaneity carefully captured in her photographs, she had been secretly unhappy.

It seemed counterintuitive that anyone would insist on creating a false external image of happiness. And yet, in a crazy way, it made sense.

Growing up, we are taught that college should be the time of our lives. For many, going to college marks the first experience of real independence; it also represents the final few years free of “real world” responsibilities—things like taking out a mortgage and having to shop for groceries on a regular basis. The combination of freedom and the ability to take advantage of that freedom is what makes college a unique stage in our lives.

And no one lets us forget it. In college, they say, you get to craft your own academic pursuits, to explore your interests in considerable depth. You make the friendships that last a lifetime. You may even meet your future spouse. The seeds of future happiness are planted in these four brief years.

But with the promise of such great things, have college students now begun to live by unreasonable expectations? My friend’s insistence on appearing happy, my own confusion in the wake of freshman disillusionment—these were merely different reactions to the same problem: the need to conform to an external conception of how our lives should be.

The preoccupation with finding happiness and making the most of college is particularly notable at Harvard. If going to college in general represents an eye-opening experience, then going to Harvard represents a veritable four-year orgy of opportunity and excitement. With guest speakers and seminars daily, concerts and shows, hundreds of famed professors and dozens of research opportunities—not to mention a thriving metropolis just a T-ride away—the standard advice to “make the most of college” suddenly takes on a whole new level of meaning.

It probably doesn’t help, then, that Harvard has a reputation, even among its own students, as a place of inexhaustibly ambitious “Type A” personalities. Nearly all of the friends and classmates to whom I spoke pointed to self-imposed expectations as a cause of the intense atmosphere on campus, an atmosphere not often conducive to happiness. By transforming it from a subconscious desire to a self-conscious necessity, the aggressive nature of Harvard students ironically makes happiness more difficult to attain. One student explained that he felt obligated to go to as many dinners, seminars, and speaker events as possible, simply to avoid “shortchanging” his college experience. Hearing this, I couldn’t help but wonder: what did it mean when opportunities were no longer individual delights, but merely boxes to be checked triumphantly off of our to-do lists? Was it normal to feel guilty for not taking advantage of everything? At a place like Harvard, where every day has the potential to be great, every moment to be life-changing, it seems the greatest fear we have is the fear of missing out.

A few months ago, over dinner, a friend and I were talking about our dreams for the future. “I don’t know what I want,” he told me. “It keeps changing. This week I want to be a doctor. Last week I wanted to be a pilot.” He ran a hand wearily through his hair. “But really, I’m not a very ambitious person. I just want to live a happy life.” Facetiously, I told him that he had settled on the most ambitious claim of all.

But as we picked through our chicken marsala, I also realized that happiness ultimately has nothing to do with ambition or expectation. After two years of college, my life still looks nothing like a brochure. There are still highs and lows to each day and week; I am still meeting new people, many of them fabulous; Cabot Library is still ugly. But something important has changed. In abandoning the idea of finding an illusive perfect life, I have gained the luxury of being real. And in shedding external standards of happiness, I have found the freedom to define the college experience for myself—not only to make the most of it, but also to make it my own.

Rena Xu ‘07 is a Biochemical Sciences concentrator in Eliot House. This is her victory face. If you are fabulous, please contact her.