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#college
queen-academia · 2 days
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joytri · 2 days
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There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I'm after. I don't know what my strengths are or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self- centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being.
Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
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one-time-i-dreamt · 2 days
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My classmate and I were taking a class at a community college halfway across the US from our school. To get there, we had to ride a supersonic jet (a Concord specifically) to and from the college and be back in time to attend our next classes at our school. 
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whokilledjared · 2 days
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the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself. (& takes on social media)
Hi.
I'm lonely.
The moment I got "two weeks off school" in sophomore year, life went to 4x speed & I can't turn it off no matter how hard I try.
Maybe COVID-19 adolescence did numbers on me. Somewhere between the iPhone 5c and ChatGPT, 14-hour screen times have live-streamed to me a steady, homogenous death of culture.
Nothing is cool anymore. Nothing is sacred. Every movement is a trend, and every cult classic a sequel.
The value we place on things being beautiful, on being "cool," and our gatekept appreciation of how hard these things were to find: it's been co-opted, or perhaps stolen. It's been stolen by the new merchant class. "Disruptors" and "innovators" turning our lives into a burgeoning black mirror prequel. Soon, we'll graduate too, and we'll wring every morsel of value in each others' lives dry for cash.
Plain and simple, I think we're being manipulated.
Your dates are an algorithm. Your music is a social signal. And Zuck knows when you sleep.*
God. What the fuck are we doing???
“Individuation is becoming the thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.” — Carl Jung
Recently, I deleted Instagram. My first impulse was to post a story or something, announcing my departure. But then, I thought that would be lame.
I got rid of my account, too. Kinda. Over 1 year, over 800 followers removed, and what remains of me is a little grey icon, and "JM_0000000010" where my name and face used to be.
yay.
There were many people I wish I could have been friends with, but I wonder, too, why I find myself so drawn to the validation of others. Does social media affect me worse, or do we all just choose to ignore it, languishing in private?
At any rate, this last year has almost felt like re-learning how to be a human being.
Personally, I think one of the biggest markers for maturity is when you become willing to disappoint the people you know in favor of what feels right to you, when you start to unravel the stories you’ve told yourself (or been told) about who you are and what you should be. In short, the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself.
And sometimes, I think about every college student that has ever lived. My grandmother, my dad, and so on. Just consider for a moment all kids who graduated before 2010:
What was it like for the ones in 1940? To walk around, before a campus had computers? In 2006: To meet someone pretty, but forget their number? In 1999: To cram into dorms, and watch Seinfeld live on-air?
Would I, like my dad in 1988, have braved cold night, brisk wind, & landline phone-call just to knock and see if my friends were too busy to hang?
What stories could I tell if there was even the slightest chance of getting lost on the way home from a party?
Humans are social creatures. We crave our friends like water. To me, the clearest difference between Dasani and Instagram is that one of them comes in a bottle.
Yet despite these distractions and comforts we have in 2024, somehow, we still have engineering students. People who carve out time in their day to sit down, look at paper, and solve differential equations. But then, that's not so hard, is it? It just takes time. Precious, fucking, time.
At Meta, leagues and leagues of these engineers power behavioral scientists, who are competing for the highest salary. Their benchmarks? Your FOMO. Guilt. Anxiety. Obsession. The worse you feel, the more you engage with their content. The more you engage with their content, well, you're starting to get the point.
Try something for me: Open up Instagram, but don't tap anything. What happens? How many little animations? How many tiny nudges prompting you to get lost? Our home-pages are billion-dollar diving boards, hoisting us over engineered catacombs of subconscious quicksand.
My homepage is my FOMO, my envy, and my crushes. The pain and struggle of trying to be someone who I am not. My little existential crises, bundled-up, packaged, and shipped with a like button.
To abandon your social networks entirely, however, requires a safety net of close friends. After all, your friends are online, and you'd be miserable without them.
This is the problem with our monkey brains. Millennia of sociological natural-selection have made us quite great at feeling terrible. We're damn good at making tribal status games to play with, too.
Seeking refuge in quirked up septum piercings and boygenius listeners, my time in counter-cultural, alternative "scenes" between St. Louis and Tampa has shown me that even the weirdest of folks and the most removed can accidentally find themselves reduced to nothing more than high-school popularity contests. Even if I love them. Even if they're amazing people. We're human.
We can't "quit social media" as much as we can't "quit bottled water" Sure, we can, but it's inconvenient. And even without a bottle, we're still drinking water.
So I lost touch with my friends. I got no new updates on their lives. I forced myself into the inconvenience of not having a phone to reach for in fleeting moments of boredom. Suddenly, I was out of the loop. Suddenly, I was bored. And suddenly, nobody missed me. My only friends were the ones I had the time to text. Everyone else ... does not exist.
Weekends have become more valuable than ever. Without the empty social calories of seeing my friends' pictures, I find myself planning hangouts as often as my schedule allows. I have more lunches, more study sessions, and more is done in the company of less.
And I have the time to breathe.
And in this calm, I think I found my answer: it's my misplaced ambition. These fears of anxiety and people I thought I would miss, they seem represent something I want to see more of within myself. Something I want to develop, lean into more deeply, as an individual. And I think that's quite normal; to look out into the world and feel attracted to things we want to see more of. This is, I think, how everyone develops their own definition of beauty — and of coolness. It's largely the intersection of what we find most interesting, and what we want to see more of in the world. Because beauty and coolness, by definition, are rare and hard to find. If they were everywhere, nothing be beautiful, nor would anything be cool.
When we all turn into wrinkles and cataracts, bad backs and heart attacks, for a brief, glorious moment, our lives are going to flash before our eyes. In this moment, you'll see your story. The ultimate progression of you.
How much of that will be skibidi toilet and reaction clips? How much of that will be arguing on the internet? Can you tell me, just how much of your life will you have skipped over to pacify your intentionally-lowered attention span?
That girl whose number you couldn't find Those passing questions over coffee that you couldn't search on Google The boredom of a subway ride
Those are not inconveniences, they're what the older generations refer to as "life."
* (oh, but if you can't sleep, consider this aside: Google knows the angle you walk at, how fast you're walking, and they've got crowdsourced pictures of everywhere around you at all times of the day. fun bedtime thoughts <3)
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xjackxv · 3 days
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ℑ 𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔨 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔰𝔱𝔲𝔡𝔶 𝔰𝔬 ℑ 𝔠𝔞𝔫 𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔳𝔢𝔩 🏛️
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anybodyhaveaclue · 1 day
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Average college student
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citrusstudies · 3 days
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As I enter April (sometimes called Hell Month), I try to treat small moments with greater attention.
This latte was SO good. The enviornment in the coffee shop was perfect for a productive session. I laughed and smiled today. I saw a bumble bee for the first time in months. People were outside with each other. I got a good amount of work done. I got to help someone twice today.
Finals is a hard time, but mindfulness really does help.
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magicaloxford · 3 days
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Oxford's beautiful Exeter College, where the astrological doctor Richard Napier studied in the sixteenth century 🌿. Napier consulted astrological charts in his medical practice and treated patients with starry charms 🌠.
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mindfulstudyquest · 14 hours
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my goal in life is to become the most well educated, well dressed, well mannered, most successful, most humble person you'll ever come across.
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sage-green-kitchen · 3 days
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Its insane that people read books just for good grades and not for the valuable perspectives and life lessons and artistic value and enjoyment they add to their lives
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halcyonhomie · 2 days
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thefloralmenace · 7 hours
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While I was sorting through my email last weekend, I found where one of my college professors sent me this, and it's so wholesome. Supportive educators are everything.
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groguspicklejar · 3 days
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tldr: due to my clinical depression and crippling anxiety, i got triggered by an optimist who didn't validate me in my moment of vulnerability.
don't read unless you want to see the ugly side of me.
i swear to god, optimistic people either scare me or annoy the fuck out of me.
and this is not coming from a place of like "oh, let me dampen this person's mood with my negative thoughts, opinions and feelings just for kicks" or "i genuinely hate this person's energy and i hope they die in a ditch" no. none of that. lemme explain.
mostly, it's coming from a place of "all of these atrocities happening around you and either choose blissful ignorance or you see them and your first thought is 'eh, it'll all work out in the end for us' is either slightly or extremely toxic in the sense of you become tone deaf to other people's negative thoughts, feelings and experiences, to the point where you might even completely disregard and invalidate them despite them being vulnerable and telling you very detailed and personal things about themselves" and i fucking hate you for it.
i think my mother is the same way but i can't exactly be sure because she's gaslighted me about certain things so many times into feeling like things weren't as bad as i made them seem when they really might have been three times as bad.
but this one guy, who's a friend of mine, really showed me that he has that exact mentality and i'm starting to hate him for it.
because how do you hear a friend of yours explain to you that their college experience wasn't as good as yours because it wasn't what they signed up for, they weren't physically, mentally, emotionally and financially prepared for it, so they had to drop out of college because they simply could not keep up with the standard required so now they don't miss any of that shit that they went through.
and your first response is "oh, give it a couple of months, you'll start to miss it😃" like—
bitch, shut up. SHUT THE FUCK UP. stop fucking talking right now before i go over there just to throw a cinderblock on your fucking face. repeatedly. until you stop fucking breathing. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.
i've never been more angry or just fucking done because i've been made to feel like shit every time i have to disclose the fact that i had to drop out of college because even though i explain from a to z of how it even got to that point, nobody seems to want to fucking hear me.
this guy finished college just recently, he was a year above me so he didn't go through the absurd changes in curriculum as i did so he doesn't even fucking know what i had to deal with. and i get that everyone is entitled to an opinion and you're allowed to disagree but to say "oh, you'll miss it" after i spent how many minutes of my life explaining how i got fucked over into wasting 3½ years of my life on a by a college system that wasn't completely transparent from the fucking beginning and chose to change things for the worst as time went on🚮
like at that point, just shut up. please. for the love of god. i've been bullied enough over this. i don't need to be gaslit into thinking i'll miss anything or anyone anymore. i'm so tired.
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stemcellee · 13 hours
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march 27 2023
been on spring break! admittedly i struggle with just allowing myself to rest. it’s like yeah i can relax and recharge but also im not going on a vacation or trip like some friends which kinda sucks…and then on the other hand im like well there’s so much time to get ahead / be productive about my research projects! But I can’t find the energy to do that either LOL
I definitely spend a lot of time thinking about things I could do rather than just doing them,,,
ig: @ stemcellee
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xjackxv · 22 hours
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𝕷𝖊𝖙 𝖒𝖊 𝖇𝖎𝖙𝖊 𝖞𝖔𝖚🍷
-𝖑𝖔𝖛𝖊, 𝖞𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖛𝖆𝖒𝖕𝖎𝖗𝖊 𝖇𝖔𝖞𝖋𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖓𝖉.
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quvnhi · 2 days
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She's so cute 🤩
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