When visiting Yale, you might be surprised to find an entire corridor in the Schwarzman Center devoted to student well-being. It’s called the Good Life Center. Every week, the center sends out cheery emails inviting students to mindfulness workshops, promoting its yoga classes, and even soliciting applications for “wellness grants.”

Last year, I took the bait. Inside, I found cozy nap pods, soft lighting and tiny instruments I could pluck off the wall — I picked the kalimba. But my enthusiasm turned to horror when I realized the Good Life Center overlooked Grove Street Cemetery. I peered out the window, tried to read the gravestones and wondered if the dead had ever learned how to live “the good life.” I certainly hadn’t.

Unfortunately, the “good life” at Yale ends with a corridor in the Schwarzman Center. Tucked away behind heavy doors on the second floor, it’s hard to find and easy to forget. On my way in, I passed flyers for consulting clubs and overheard students running case interviews. And when I finally arrived, what awaited me wasn’t enlightenment but the view of a graveyard. I left asking the same questions: What does it mean to live well? To feel fulfilled?

If Yale students, in the most formative years of their lives, cannot even begin to answer these questions, then the university has failed to educate. It’s admirable that Yale has a space like the Good Life Center. But building a single corridor overlooking a cemetery while the student body grows increasingly anxious is like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. 

Yale has made other fleeting efforts to improve well-being. Professor Laurie Santos’s “Psychology and the Good Life” became the most popular course in Yale’s history; she stopped teaching it due to burnout. And this year, President McInnis welcomed Jonathan Haidt to discuss “How to be a student in an era of anxiety and political polarization.” I was eager to attend, but my hopes were dashed when I received an email from the President’s House — written like a job rejection — indicating I had been waitlisted for the event.

These examples show how Yale treats fulfillment like an extracurricular instead of a core part of education. You might assume four years at an elite university would teach students to think critically about purpose and community. You might expect that Yale’s unofficial motto — “For God, For Country, and For Yale” — signifies a real commitment to service and civic responsibility.

Yet those values are rarely cultivated systematically. Beyond a handful of service organizations like Dwight Hall, few spaces invite serious reflection on moral purpose. The prevailing culture rewards résumés, job offers and personal advancement. In an environment dominated by club applications and early recruiting, why would anyone pause to ask what fulfillment means?

Even Yale’s once-famous residential college system — long celebrated for fostering belonging — has frayed. In four years, most students attend only two formal college dinners: first year and senior year. Many never get to know their head of college or dean personally, and most I’ve spoken to have never met many others in their own college — a place that’s supposed to be home. Older faculty recall a time when college life meant real camaraderie; that vision now feels nostalgic.

If Yale wants to live up to its ideals, it must teach students not only how to succeed but how to live well. That change starts with staff and administrators actually sharing Yale’s stated values with its students. Yale claims its mission is to educate “aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society.” It’s true that Yale’s admissions process recruits students who end up in every sector, but the university does little to actually form them once they arrive. The burden has fallen on high school students to identify as leaders before they even set foot on campus.

Yale must return its focus to residential college life and institutionalize structured spaces for reflection — regular, mandatory events with deans and heads of college in dining halls or common rooms where students and faculty talk openly about fulfillment, purpose, and service. Yale should also make public service a more viable path. The University already offers the Kerry and Millstone fellowships, but those reach only a fraction of students.

Expanding postgraduate funding and advising for government or nonprofit work would send a powerful signal: that meaning and money need not be mutually exclusive. Yale could even replace one of its distributional requirements with a service-learning option granting credit for community engagement. The goal is habituation: show students what it feels like to contribute to something larger than themselves.

The Good Life Center, for all its good intentions, is a band-aid on a deep wound. Yale cannot cultivate genuine well-being until it reclaims its purpose: to form resilient citizens, not just achievers. It should use its vast resources to help students practice service, rediscover community and confront life’s hardest questions before they leave campus. Yale must at least teach us to ask what fulfillment means — and give us space to find an answer. The day it does, students might look out from the Good Life Center’s windows onto the graves and, instead of despair, feel peace in their plan to live well while they still can.

ALEX GREENE is a senior in Branford College studying Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He can be reached at alex.greene@yale.edu.