While trying to find somewhere to write this column Wednesday night, my roommate and I ended up wandering through Main Stacks.
Presumably because it is “midterm season” — which at Berkeley just means anytime after the first month of class and before finals — the library was packed. We spent 20 minutes searching the three floors there and annoying row upon row of faces peering seriously into screens illuminated by Facebook.
While we wandered, my roommate kept muttering about how much she hates Berkeley and all the “try-hards” sometimes. I ended up leaving the library alone two hours after we got there but was awoken at 2 a.m. by the sound of my roommate returning home after six hours of studying.
There is a performative aspect to going to the library. When you sit down at one of the heavy wooden tables at Stacks, you are signifying your intention to engage in the heavy task of scholarship. Your uncomfortable chair and implied promise of silence are indications of your seriousness — indications that what you must now do requires your complete and undivided attention.
But if that’s the case, then why had so many of the people in the library Wednesday night trekked all the way out there just to procrastinate on Facebook?
One answer would be that it’s easier to accomplish something when you’re in an atmosphere that encourages accomplishment, and with their intense seriousness, Berkeley’s libraries definitely do that.
But I think they do something else too, something that equally encourages us to drift toward Facebook. When we are surrounded by 100 serious-faced students, it’s easy to see that seriousness as competitiveness, to realize that they might also be putting all of what they have toward goals a lot like ours, goals that only so many of us can accomplish — that they might be just as much of a try-hard as we are.
The reason we drift toward Facebook, I think, is because we aren’t sure exactly how much we are capable of putting toward our goals, and we are afraid of finding out. One of the signs of perfectionism is procrastination — what we might think of as Facebook-browsing born out of the fear that once we actually start working on what we have to do, we won’t be able to do it successfully; that we might get to the point where we have tried as hard as we can and it just isn’t enough.
How much effort is enough, anyway? Is it enough to be one of the smartest people in a specific class? In a specific major? At UC Berkeley in general? Is going to UC Berkeley enough? What if the campus’s ranking, even if we understand how arbitrary rankings can be, goes down? And after that, is it enough to get the best job? Is it enough to get the best job among our friends or among the people who came from circumstances similar to ours? Should we take badly paid internships in order to get to those jobs? Unpaid ones? Should we pay employers to give us the experience we need to succeed?
And then there’s the way the Internet has given us such a convenient way to compare ourselves to one another. It only takes a few seconds to scan classmates’ LinkedIn profiles and see their entire professional history or to go through their Facebooks to get a handle on their social one.
Pressure on a college campus, or more broadly the pressure of being a young person trying to invent yourself, aren’t novel concepts. Coming to college means being given a chance to reinvent yourself, to build yourself from the bottom up into a perfectly new person in a new context. Decontextualized, we are faced with the terrifying prospect of being whatever we want.
And as “the best public university in the world,” Berkeley has a special brand of this pressure. The rhetoric here is complex. Being the best public university doesn’t mean we are the best overall, necessarily; it means we are the best among universities funded by the public good. The implication in that rhetoric, I think, is that the reason we are the best is because we are the product of the people. We’re people who have worked our way here, rather than being given this opportunity through some kind of legacy program.
That value, the value of being self-made, is both wonderful and terrifying. At least theoretically, if it is true, it means we are here because we deserve to be. But it also means that both the success we seek and the failure that pursuit might ultimately end in are on our own shoulders. And sometimes that’s a thought that drives me toward the distraction of Facebook.
Contact Sarah Burns at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @_SBurns.