Jay-Z once said, “you can pay for school but you can’t buy class.” But did Jay-Z ever attend a Canadian university, where tuition costs rise about 3 percent each academic year, making the average cost for a student to attend Western University roughly seven grand. Add onto that the costs of living in a six bedroom home with a subpar roof, textbooks better served as paperweights, and a thrice weekly ramen noodle diet and you’re looking at roughly 14,000 dollars. For a student like me, sailing by on government loans and a part-time job, it seems next to impossible to climb out of the mountain of debt I’ve accumulated, and nearing the halfway point of my fourth and final year of undergrad I can already feel the stress of expensive monthly loan repayments on a meagre salary. On top of that, social media has provided an outlet for me to ogle over my fellow peers cool life experiences, which appear before me like an expensive slideshow of countries and events I can’t even afford to dream about. While I’d love to take a year off to find myself on a beach in south France with my best friend, the pressures of settling into a career and starting the slow and steep climb up the corporate ladder seem to be reeling me in with a noose. I don’t know where my life is supposed to go, and like most students at this stage of the game I feel conflicted between starting a meaningful career and experiencing the world, with my pitiful bank statements trailing closely behind like a ghost.
Social media doesn’t make my life choices seem any less mundane either. My fellow peers are jet setting after graduation on exotic trips, or updating their employment information to well-known companies, and I feel like the coolest thing I’ve done all week is share a Buzzfeed quiz result in which I was deemed, “Posh Spice” in the “Which Spice Girl Are You?” questionnaire. The after-graduation pressure to truly move on to “bigger and better” things is only amplified with the constant reminder that people all around you are also pining for the same goals, and are sometimes already twenty steps ahead.
I constantly have to remind myself that we live in an era where social media and reality have been essentially fused together. We see a photo or a status update from a Facebook friend and it is taken for verbatim truth, a direct representation of what that person feels, thinks or even looks like. In the same way magazine covers airbrush their models to the point of being unrecognizable, Facebook allows people to share what they deem worthy, which are not necessarily the most accurate depictions of their lives and the struggles that led them to that point.
Your life is meant to be lived for you. Which is common sense, of course but it’s easier said than done when we are being bombarded with questions like, “What are you doing after school?” and you’re feeling torn between what you want to do and what you may have to for financial reasons. Post grad is scary for everyone, and whatever decision you make is what you feel is best suited to your needs and desires at that particular moment. Comparing yourself to everyone else around you won’t make that decision any easier. Although it’s inevitable, don’t let it cloud your own judgement.
Sometimes I have to scroll through my newsfeed just to remind myself that at the end of the day I’m Posh Spice, and she went on to become a world renowned fashion designer after her days of black platforms and sleek A line bobs were over. With hard work and some determination there is hope for absolutely every last one of us, and besides, I would look horrendous with a sleek A line bob.