On campuses such as UNC-Chapel Hill’s, the plague of home-workaholism is painfully evident. The stench of stressed out kids hyped up on way too many caffeine pills is ever-present in the air, and UNC-CH houses a culture of Adderall black markets and late night study lounge cry-fests. The culture here, as well as at many other “elite” colleges, is all work hard, party hard. Sleep is for the weak, and, if you aren’t taking 17 credit hours, you’re under-loading.
I think professors are, on some level, aware of our collective case of home-workaholism. If they weren’t, well, I’m not sure they’d be qualified to teach in the first place. No one makes much of an effort to mask the stench of anxiety under these Carolina blue skies. Besides listing CAPS (don’t get me started on the quality of CAPS here) as a resource on their syllabus, most professors seem to be at a loss for what to do. Many professors don’t seem to grasp that the work they give us rarely fits into their clean-cut time estimations, if they bother to make them. This isn’t really their fault. Students are rarely masterfully efficient at homework. Home-workaholism isn’t even about the amount of work given. It’s about how we do it. And what we do when we’re not doing it.
What’s wrong with working hard? There’s nothing wrong with doing your work, doing it well, maybe stressing a little about it and then moving on with your life, but that would require a level of compartmentalization that is far beyond most of our reaches. As students who live, eat, party, sleep and breathe on (or close to) campus, academia bleeds into every part of our lives. The books and problem sets are nearly impossible to escape. The philosophical questions and theoretical physics. The internship applications and graduation requirements. None of this would be so bad if we didn’t have this work hard, party hard, overachiever culture here.
I’m willing to make a bet that most of us know, on some level, that we work hard. But, on the level that matters, we think that we don’t work hard enough.
This type of comparative, never-good-enough consciousness must be inevitable when you take a bunch of overachievers from across the country, stick them in one small town and say “go make your future happen.” We lose the art of leisure because we are never doing enough. We can’t relax because we could be using that free time for reading “smart people” books, looking for internships or studying for the MCAT or LSAT. We feel guilty for relaxing. Employers and graduate school admission offices aren’t going to care that we were taking care of ourselves, not if our GPA is less than a 3.5. Every minute we spend on Netflix is a foot lost in the rat race that is attending an elite college — or a college in general. Even as we are watching our favorite shows, we can’t truly enjoy them. Our work time bleeds into our free time. If we aren’t working, we’re doing something wrong. We need support and validation. Our generational mental health is facing a crisis. And where do we turn? When CAPS and equally underfunded resources fail, where do we turn? Partying, drinking, drugs, crying, panic attacks? Those sound like more commonly used “cures” to me. Hell, our home-workaholism is so bad that those “cures” are glorified, made into jokes or made into the subject of competition. “How many hours we can stay up?” becomes a competition to get the least sleep. We wear our insomnia like a badge.
Recently, I’ve been told about the CAPS program at the school down the road. The funding it receives, compared to ours, is incredible. Most people in academia see this trend of toxic overachiever-ism. Private schools have the means — the capital — to do something impactful about it. Public schools are subject to the whims of boards and politics. And North Carolina State Government is not known for its brilliant education budgeting or prioritization of mental health. Public school kids may receive a little support, but, for the most part, and compared to our private school counterparts, we are left to fend for ourselves.
I’m sorry I can’t throw out a “Ten tricks for self-care” or a “How to prevent your school work from consuming you” article that will miraculously make your — or my — life ten times better. There are no simple answers, only salves for the tumor that is home-workaholism. I wish we could internalize that “grades aren’t everything” or “your GPA doesn’t define you.” I think our eyes are too open for that. Yeah, grades aren’t everything. Our GPA isn’t some human serial number by which people can identify us. But, as long as our institutions define us by these things; as long as they accept and reject us based largely on these things; as long as internships, graduate schools and employers are constantly asking for more; as long as tuition gets higher and debts grow larger, I don’t think any of us are willing to give ourselves any slack. Because, as soon as we do, someone else gets ahead. Someone else is always doing more. Someone else is always working harder. At least, that is how we feel. This is the mentality that weakens our immunity to home-workaholism.
The need to work hard, while also taking care of yourself and creating appropriate priorities, is an important lesson to learn, for sure. This is a skill that I hope we all get to perfect. But the internalization of the lesson doesn’t make the circumstances that require us to learn that lesson justified. The toxic rat race, the game we feel we must play, the lack of support we get. Those are the greedy tendrils that encroach on this wonderful gift of education we are supposed to have. We are incredibly grateful that we get to attend this institution. At the same time, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows over here.
One silver lining on this cumulonimbus cloud of impossible expectations is the solidarity. Deep under the crust of competition is a core of collaboration between us kids. Here, in this library, we all struggle together, questioning if all this work will even get us to where we were promised. We are all striving for something better, chasing our dreams and all that. And, all things considered, I think we’re doing a pretty dang good job of it.