Am I Doing University Wrong?

On the fear of missing out in the most social years of your life.

THE UNIVERSITY YEARS, especially the first, are to be taken up with drinking, clubbing, and one-night stands. This is how it is supposed to go. I never wanted any of that, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I was supposed to be chasing it; surrounded by eternally passing-out, salacious peers, I struggled to feel certainty in this peaceful, uneventful position I’d taken up - walks with my partner, regular journeys between here and home.

I’d settled down, not settled in to university the way everyone else seemed to.

There’s an unavoidable sense of isolation to being the odd one out, for whatever reason that abnormality may be. And so, I was happy, but constantly worried that I was missing out. This, mixed with a potent bout of homesickness to start off the year, kept me oscillating between satisfaction and desire. Burdened with the life I knew I wanted to lead, and the lives I saw around me, I had the choice of both and paradoxically, I wanted neither. Both choices felt like giving something up, condemning a different me.

My ideal image of the future was constantly in flux, great swirling pools of vague projections – two sprightly kids and a yappy dog, or dancing drunk through old town in the early hours of the morning, or competitive managerial positions in sterile law firms. I gravitated towards each future without intending on committing to any. At any given time, I felt the lack of whichever wasn’t my primary focus, but never the complete uncertainty that can only be cured by blindly giving in to one singular vision.

So, I was caught in the seams between maturing and conforming. I saw monogamy as monotony, and intoxication as immaturity.

I pitied and envied my flatmates, who were clubbing every night and had a seemingly endless rotation of friends. Of company. I wasn’t lonely, but I didn’t have the social circles they had, and that worried me. Even with my perfect home life to fall back on.

I knew that what I had then, and where I was at, was where I wanted to be in the future, but the fact that I was seemingly already there scared me. It wasn’t supposed to go this fast, was it? I was supposed to flail around for a few more years, hit the hard brick wall at 25, and turn myself around, I thought. Grow up and start taking life seriously.

So, despite having everything I knew I’d ever want from a social life, I was in search of more. I didn’t find it in the bars and clubs populated by my flatmates. I didn’t find it in the meaningless romance of mysterious men¹ with undetermined last names. I was trying to fill holes already plugged, trying to cure myself of a sickness I didn’t have.

The desire for what I already had constituted no more than a repackaging. I just wanted to feel differently about my situation, to feel like I was fitting it, doing the early 20s right. I wanted to feel like one of my peers, going through same universal university experiences. I wanted stories to tell my future children, advice for them when they asked about these sensitive topics. I didn’t want to tell them I’d always been like this, the stolid parent seemingly incapable of excitement or spontaneity. I wanted to be exciting, vague, vivacious, bright. I wanted these things entirely for their own sake.

As the year went on, I envied my peers less and pitied them a lot more. I saw firsthand the self-flagellation and loathing that accompanied their Instagrammable lifestyles. The commitments to sobriety, the deep desire to find love, the sorrowful awkwardnesses of home life. I had what they all wanted, the absence that they were all drinking and smoking and partying to plug. And yet, for a while, I would’ve traded them in that lifestyle for the absence itself, given the thing they were running towards to take their shoes from them, to experience their longing manifested in social extremity.

I suppose the grass is always greener. But, that grass, their grass, withered in my mind as the year went on. I was more accepting of my lot, leaned more heavily into the equanimity of my daily life. I stopped wanting what I was told to want, and recognised the pleasantries of my days that others were so jealous of, and chased so hard with the very coping mechanisms I was, for a long time, desperate to be involved with.

It’s easy to feel like you’re missing out when, in a certain sense, you really are. Everybody around you is committed to a certain kind of lifestyle, and it’s human nature to fit in. Conformity is safety, and we’re conditioned to seek out safe spaces and groups. But, by the end of the year, I saw that I was conflating safety with regression. I was happy with the person I was growing into, and I was happy to be this person forever. Why weaken that now, just to be recovered later? Why subject myself to the masochism and the insecurity, just to fight my way out of it in a few years’ time?

I spent that year in search of something I already had. What I have is strong, and supportive, and wonderfully plain. It’s a foundation to build a life upon, despite the immediate social costs. By the end of that year, I was certain that my grass was greener, not because anything had changed, but because I’d finally stopped looking over the fence.

1. Originally I wrote this essay for anishka, which is why many of the gendered comments are from a heterosexual female perspective. I have chosen to leave these moments unaltered.