spring semester; freshman year at Columbia

I was at a “party” (one of those evenings when nondescript shoegaze music is playing from someone’s ipod speakers and enough minglers are standing around in a dorm room for it to be a fire hazard) two nights ago. 

Conversation was underwhelming; everyone reverted to the same questions: what classes are you taking? how were the holidays? how was your week? are you still thinking of majoring in…

One sentence my friends and I toss around a lot is: “this is Columbia,” and we use it to mean, “you should be better,“ as if because we are here, we are magically capable of constant intellectual engagement, artistic expression, scientific discovery, or, at the very least, critical thinking and reasoning. But it doesn’t. It means we’re in a place that expects us to strive for these things but gives us no guarantee. An institution is the people in it, but no individual is willing to see himself as a reflection of the institution he is a part of, at least not if it represents things he admires; at least not at first. And I think rightly so, because that kind of arrogance is hardly conducive to growth and innovation. Rarely does the person who thinks he embodies greatness actually allow himself the freedom to pursue things with a fresh eye and unburdening expectations. 

But there’s a problem when no one wants to be accountable for certain kinds of engagement while simultaneously expecting everyone else to be. What I’m getting at is this: there’s a flaw and a contradiction to how we view the school we attend. The members of this community are self-selecting, and they opt into this world because it is a prestigious school filled with the kind of people who pride themselves in being known as those people who do “everything” (or one thing astronomically well). 

Sometimes I feel like I have to be a show-horse or something. I’m no show-horse (no matter how much I like sugar and ribbons). And neither are my friends, despite the fact that I feel that they put themselves in situations where that’s what they seem like. I’m sure I do too. It’s annoying as fuck.

And it’s stupid. I’m doing this thing where I’m writing because I need to get this out of my system, to rationalize my first week of the semester. I didn’t mean to get into this talk about Columbia and what it means to be a part of this community. But I’ve been thinking a lot about social interactions and what it means to be a part of communities on microcosmic levels as well as on the macro-scale. 

When I saw this prompt (“write one leaf about stupidity”), I thought I was going to write about Facebook and what it’s done to social interactions and the ways we think about each other. I deactivated my Facebook for the upteenth time last night. But this time it wasn’t an impulsive act. I sat down and I wrote a list, I talked it through with a friend of mine; after going over all the main purposes of the site, she chose to deactivate her account, too. 

I’m tired of keeping a false sense of closeness to people based on frequency and not quality of “contact.” Our minds are built to strengthen associations based on repetition. We remember what we are able to recall again and again. When we log onto Facebook, we see the same names, pictures, patterns of self-promotion everyone has to create in order to sustain their roles on the site. This gives us a false sense of closeness because of that built-in way we process repetitive, consistent stimuli.

One day I saw a book that reminded me of a friend I had in the seventh grade. He and I were not Facebook friends. We fell out of touch after that year. I forgot he existed. When I saw the book I was instantly transported back to our dumb jokes and I thought, how nice it is that I was able to forget him. I don’t want to cheat myself out of forgetting and remembering.

Knowing where someone vacationed or who he or she is in a relationship with entitles me to absolutely nothing in the way of friendship with him or her. If I need Facebook to remember a friend’s birthday, maybe I should re-evaluate how I define the word friend. 

Text messages make planning and contact with people physically close to me impossibly easy. E-mails, Skype, and actual phone calls make the rest accessible.

All the reasons I felt compelled to remain on Facebook are unnatural as far as I am concerned. Maybe it’s my own damage: I get satisfaction from eliminating things from my life, whether it’s objects that clutter up my room or unethically-processed food that I eat or certain forms of interaction with other people. But I’d rather devote my web-time to exploring news, multimedia, and my own thoughts rather than pictures of a hot guy I will never know. 

It’s easy for me to become possessive and obsessive about people when I don’t actually know them, when I keep tabs on them in a virtual space. It’s a natural human response. The same way people build relationships to celebrities and have for the past few centuries, we are beginning to build with our constellations of acquaintances: we know what they do, who they are in strict external senses, and we enjoy judging and talking and thinking about them the same way we’ve enjoyed doing about celebrities in gossip magazines for decades; we are removed enough to indulge in this without it being too “weird,” at least not until close inspection. Let me repeat part of that: we are removed. 

Maybe if I was older I’d love Facebook. I’d love talking to college and high school friends, seeing pictures of their kids, getting in touch with relatives from Europe or South America and seeing how their grandparents are doing. 

But I’m too young for Facebook to be convenient in the right ways, for the people in my life to be that scattered that I can’t reach them through e-mail or my phone. 

(Source: writeoneleaf)