Stop the complain-brag

It’s only the third week of school, but the daily grind is already all too normal for us. Gone are the days of first classes, when there was a chance the professor would just hand out the syllabus, introduce the class briefly, and let you leave. No, now things have gotten real, at an alarmingly rapid rate. As a consequence, the libraries are starting to fill once more with all types of studiers, from the earnest to the desperate. The halls of Butler echo with the sounds of students talking about how much work they have to get done and how little they have slept. As Maren Killackey hilariously illustrated in her op-ed last week (“Think away the stress,” Feb. 1) these conversations have a tendency to become competitive rather quickly. They’re tinged with an odd sort of pride and triumph—no one would converse like this were there not a feeling that staying up all night or having a multiplicity of problem sets is an accomplishment.

This strange sort of rationale seems to infect our conversations at Columbia, leading us to engage in something I call the “complain-brag,” where things like lack of sleep or too much work are whined about in a strangely self-congratulatory way. These things are unpleasant and awful, but we treat them like awards or accolades. Why do we do this? Logically speaking, we know that not sleeping is really not something to brag about.

Maybe it’s a symptom of our status as high achievers. Whenever we have any sort of accomplishment, no matter how unpleasant it was to attain it, we naturally want to brag about it. But I think it goes deeper than that. It’s not so much that we brag about losing sleep because it led us to write an excellent paper. It’s the sleeplessness itself that we treat as an achievement, the bags under our eyes like some perverse badge of honor. I believe the real reason we complain-brag is because there’s an unspoken assumption among Columbians that the more stressed we are or the harder we push ourselves, the better we are as students and the more we’ve done. We complain-brag about our stress because we feel it proves we’ve earned our right to be here. We’re competing with each other, all secretly wondering how we can be any good as students when everybody’s so much more stressed than we are.

But this line of thinking isn’t based on fact. The incredible variation in people’s schedules, majors, and ways of doing work renders it meaningless. I’m an English major—which means that my important stress-inducing assignments are usually spread out over the semester with nice amounts of buffer time in between. In contrast to that, my engineering friends seem to have large assignments due every other day. Students with internships or work-study jobs have less time to get everything done than those of us who are simply taking classes. Extracurriculars throw everyone for a loop from time to time, and some days are more productive than others. The bottom line is that it’s impossible to tell how much work anyone is doing based on stress levels alone. Are they taking six classes, or did they just forget about the paper until the night before it was due? There are way too many variables for stress to be an accurate measurement of how well we’re doing as students.

But beyond all that, it’s unhealthy. Working ourselves into the ground may make us feel better about ourselves, but it will quickly lead to burnout, frustration, anxiety, and poor health. This idea that the more stressed we are, the better we are as students puts too much emphasis on pushing ourselves in ways that aren’t good for us. It leads us to neglect our physical well-being, our friends, and the non-school things that we love doing. It also encourages the cutthroat atmosphere that makes Columbia feel like a hostile place. The unspoken competition for “most stressed” (read: best student), as manifested in the complain-brag, pulls us apart and pits us one against the other, making it even harder to create the community that we wish we had.

This semester, instead of complain-bragging and worrying whether we’re working as hard as everyone else, let’s come together and support each other when things get rough. Maybe instead of one-upmanship, we’d hear encouragement in conversations at Butler instead. Now that’s something that would make me want to study there more often.

Kathryn Brill is a Barnard College junior majoring in English. She is a member of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. We Should Talk runs alternate Tuesdays.