Lucy Koerner

It is Saturday night at Yale. I am lying on the monstrous baby pink couch my suitemate found on Facebook Marketplace in a spontaneous and life-changing development for our suite. I chose to spend this Saturday night lying here in my pajamas with a book, forgoing the first rush parties of the semester and waving off the nebulous concept of a game night bouncing around in the group chat. At 11 p.m., when I open Instagram and see those distinctive red cups vivid among the hazy candids captured on digicams, I rethink my choice. 

Since my second semester as a sophomore began a scant two weeks ago, I’ve found myself following the well-trodden path of an only slightly varying conversation:

“I feel stagnant — like I’m doing nothing, or not enough.”

“I feel alone — everyone else’s friends are always doing something. Everyone else seems to have found their person already.”

“I’m not experiencing Yale the way everyone else is. I feel like I’m just going through the motions — existing.”

All of us are stagnant. All of us are alone. None of us are having that Yale experience that all of us are having. If we’re all missing out — on those formative college friendships, those insane stories we need to collect to tell our grandkids, that whirlwind picture-perfect romance, the internships everyone else has already recruited for — then how are we so convinced that we’re so special in our failures and wholly unique in our woeful misery? We’re just throwing pity parties in glass cubicles. 

College means being alone, in a way we’ve never been alone before. There’s a limit to the number of courses you can take with your best friends and the number of weekends the entire gang locks in at Tsai City. Somedays, dinner at the dining hall is just me and my earphones. Although not for lack of trying, it is impossible to G-Cal our extremely individual existences expertly enough to ensure that we’re never missing anything. 

After all, in an age of constant connection and communication, being absent means missing out. We’re all available to each other, always. We have to be when the alternative — ignoring the group chat for a few hours — is falling a chapter behind on group lore and having to play catch up. Between racing to check items off the social and academic bucket list and maintaining a perennial stream of calendar invites for brunch, lunch and dinner to friendly acquaintances we were reminded of when swiping left through their Instagram story, we’ve perfected living for the semester-end ‘x/8’ Insta dump; college means being alone and somehow spending zero time with ourselves. 

Let them wonder. The world at large does not care what you ate or what you wore, and where you went or what you did, on any given day. This semester, I deleted Instagram (I’ve gone a whole 10 days without the app) to be spontaneous and have fun and do things simply for the sake of being spontaneous and having fun and doing things. I retired my digicam, film camera and Polaroid for a bit, giving them a rest from their 24/7 job of making those staged photoshoots seem like chance glimpses into my effortlessly, endlessly interesting existence through their grainy, low-quality lens. If the cameras could have sharper focus, they might have captured the loss of the moment itself in my pursuit of its perpetuity.

 I deleted social media on a whim, inspired by (ironically) a Substack on living a curated life. However, I’m trying to make it stick, because getting up for my 9 a.m. is so much easier when I don’t have anyone else to compare my day to. If the only outfit I can put together in the 10 minutes I have is leggings and a sweatshirt, a shitty ponytail and moisturizer, at least I know the four friends who I will see have witnessed me in much worse. If my day ends up being so unremarkable that its defining quality was the 4-hour nap I took on the pink couch, then that’s perfectly fine because I have no clue how anyone else at Yale chose to spend their own day. I can’t care that there are people out there making more moves in life than I am if I don’t know it’s happening, and ignorance is bliss. I can’t lie, I’m single and that feels a lot better when I don’t see cute couples celebrating milestones on social media (congratulations though, I’m just a hater). There’s something to be said about letting others wonder, and about wondering yourself. We all know too much about each other, yet we all know nothing about each other, and if we stopped curating our existence online to reflect a rollercoaster that only ever goes up, maybe we’d feel less stagnant and alone. Maybe we would feel a lot more at peace with the Yale experience we end up having.     

I didn’t intend for this to be a recommendation to delete all social media and emulate Thoreau’s life — in all honesty, I’ll probably end up hopping back onto Instagram sooner rather than later to post a cute picture, and my own ‘2/4’ year-end dump. I think it is worth keeping in mind however, that in an already over-competitive, over-connected and overcrowded space, it is okay to log off and just exist for a bit. Not every story needs to exist online in order to exist; I hope we are all so completely invested in whatever we end up doing this Saturday night that the digi never makes it out of anyone’s pocket.