It’s a Friday evening. I’m lying in bed, phone in hand, my readings for class spread out next to me. They’ve conveniently slipped my mind for the past half hour, and I’m just about to pay them some heed when I suddenly remember the photo I posted on Instagram yesterday. Guess my work will have to wait a bit longer.

So I open the app, et cetera, et cetera, and soon I’m just idly scrolling through my feed, tagging my friends in photos I find funny. Before long, however, I begin to notice a pattern.

Appearing in almost dizzying succession is picture after picture of my peers at a football game that day, which I had zero interest in attending. Yet I can’t help an uneasy, heavy feeling from churning in my gut. Everyone looks so happy! Arms around their friends, proud red face paint and wide smiles splitting their cheeks.

I suddenly feel guilty about taking a night to myself. Maybe I should have gone out with friends. Am I not being social enough? Is this the beginning of my greatest fear in coming to college — realizing in the middle of winter quarter that I’ve made no friends in my dorm and that it’s too late?

My mind is a frenzy as I attempt to recall every interaction I had with my dormmates in the past month. There was that talent show, a movie night, a few times a week studying or eating meals together, cookie baking … to me, it seems like a lot already. But is it enough?

Herein lies the problem. We compare ourselves to others constantly, often very unfairly. Everything from academics to social life to physical appearance is fair game, and because the grass is always greener on the other side, we’re usually never happy with our observations. It’s a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with FOMO, the fear of missing out, of unwittingly excluding yourself from something meaningful.

At Stanford, this can manifest in many ways. It can be having a lot on your plate but still feeling inadequate when you’re not participating in a club or a class that someone else is doing. It can be second-guessing all your decisions, even though you know you were perfectly happy with your original choice. And yes, it can even be a football game that your peers all went to but you didn’t.

I was well aware of FOMO before coming here. I knew it was a widespread phenomenon that was only exacerbated by Stanford’s reputation for excellence, yet I believed myself unsusceptible to it.

It’s no secret that social media is a heavily glamorized version of people’s lives. Nobody wants to post about cleaning dog vomit off the carpet or about the hour they spent crying into a pillow. We’re all looking for validation, and we get that by drawing attention to our happiness and our success.

If we know all of that, then why is FOMO still a thing? Isn’t it just a matter of changing one’s attitude? Perhaps. But like a river slowly erodes the land, so repeated exposure to these seemingly-perfect falsities erodes people’s confidence and sense of reality. Sometimes I can’t bear to be on Instagram for more than a few minutes at a time due to the barrage of aesthetic reminders that everyone’s doing life better than I am.

For me, a large part of it is the fear that I’m not having the “College Experience,” which is as frustratingly vague as it sounds. My entire life up to this point has basically been everyone telling me that college was supposed to be the best four years of my life, so I showed up at NSO basically expecting to win the lottery and be swept off my feet by a tall, dark stranger on horseback.

Yeah, I’m calling B.S., big time.

Little did I know that once NSO ended and everyone stopped trying to woo us into choosing Stanford, I would spend the next several weeks in a chaotic jambalaya of homesickness, self-doubt and confusion. The adjustment period felt neverending. I remember crying alone in my room some days because doing anything else seemed overwhelming. I was often angry with myself, thinking, “So many people would love to be in your position! Why are you wasting it by being miserable? How can you possibly be sad at Stanford?”

I didn’t feel entitled to my emotions. And although I am grateful to be in a much better place today, I’m secretly afraid that I missed out on that crucial social period because I had to focus on myself during that time. I’m still paranoid about building that perfect college experience. I think that because my first few weeks were so rough, I feel even more pressure to make up for it.

I can’t help but have a checklist of sorts. Frat parties? Check. Concerts? Yup. Football games, drinking games, Late Night, frosh formal, falling asleep in lecture, falling off my bike, ramen at 3 a.m. … all done. As ridiculous as it sounds, when I’m able to check something off that list, I feel a sense of accomplishment.

At the same time, I’m never satisfied. Other people are always doing more and having more fun, at least that’s how it seems on social media. I know that a college experience is whatever I make it to be, and that what I find worthwhile and enjoyable may be different than what others choose to delight in. One day, I hope to be okay with that.

 

Contact Serena Zhang at xiaosez ‘at’ stanford.edu.