Growing up, I’ve found myself critiquing the various attitudes of my friends that influenced my philosophy behind navigating opportunity. Unfortunately, when you tell your friend that it sounds like a bad idea to pregame brunch with his family or spark up before a lab final, you come off as paternalistic and disrupt a heuristic present in young people’s social connections and roles.

As students, we have to constantly seek balance between a hyperproductive and play hard culture. The hyperproductive culture is built around the anxiety of never reaching one’s full potential and maximizing every minute working; the degenerative one counters the former by advocating for a casual approach to opportunity and life.

Both cultures are effective at distorting an individual’s sense of self, making it difficult to argue against them without sounding inflammatory. Hyperproductivity asks an individual to progress toward a constantly shifting goal, leading people to believe a sacrificial attitude is the only path to success.

The consequences of a hyperproductive mindset are evident when examining extremely disciplined and high-achieving individuals, such as Michael Jackson, who found success but lacked freedom from this sacrificial attitude. This mentality can be justified by a need for survival and an existential anxiety of not reaching one’s own potential.

The other side is the work-hard, play-harder pundit, who listened to too much Drake and identified — or falsely adopted — the comfort and privilege present in their lives. This comfort justifies their focus on academic performance as an indicator of “working hard,” while their obedience to degeneracy disguised as a “bender” limits how they can meaningfully show up — not only for others, but for themselves — past superficial indicators of success. 

Although I believe the attitude derives from the original observation of parental figures who pursued success at the expense of time with friends and family, the attitude only continues through an environment of financial comfort. 

This culture is fed by the delusion of basing success on the perpetual accumulation of capital — not to reach self-discovery or survive, but to fund further extremes of the attitude resulting in incomprehensible flexes like staying in the “Missoni room at the Byblos.”

This mindset has grown pervasive in a culture built on countering hyperproductivity, and it finds its strongest footing in highly privileged environments where the desire for social connection and personal development is superficially met, and financial discomfort is nonexistent.

To evaluate this mindset, we have to deconstruct the need for social connection that this superficially fulfills. Part of the failure of the culture to address a necessity for social connection can be found through John Calhoun’s experiment with a mice utopia. 

John Calhoun’s experiment “Universe 25” created an artificial utopian environment in which a group of mice was provided with unlimited food and water, initially living in a perfect climate with adequate housing for the initial rat population. 

A group, that was labelled by Calhoun as “the beautiful ones,” huddled in the middle and did nothing but groom and eat. The beautiful ones remained physically perfect and disengaged completely from typical behaviors found in mice by failing to both communicate and co-operate with other mice and disengaging from competition for positions in their social hierarchy. 

They were interpreted by scholars as showing the ultimate breakdown of social structure and lack of purpose; although we are far from living in a utopia, our college campus superficially resembles perfect environmental factors. 

With a vibrant social and professional atmosphere, on-campus housing, and dining hall food with maggots, our college campus resembles Calhoun’s utopia with adjusted standards. However, despite this environment providing the capacity to refine ourselves and expand our intellectual and professional identities, we give in to degenerative behaviors and interests that infest our goals. 

These behaviors and interests allow us to continue through our education and our subsequent careers, devaluing the internal sense of discomfort that drives our development as we explore our interests and develop our identities. Because this lifestyle lacks discomfort, after financial security is met, our goals remain complacent and interests that don’t provide support for the lifestyle become irrelevant.   Additionally, this attitude allows us to take our environment for granted and believe we exist in the illusion of a utopia forever. 

The question of how we should balance our work-play life and take time to develop our non-money-making hobbies and interests is ignored; so long as we find a role in activities that mimic social connection. If we can find how to make money, the behavior is justified. The culture that surrounds degenerative behavior is associated with disregarding reevaluation of values and deeper aspirations, past things like superficial indicators of success. 

Social relief should be found in activities that have progression and develop the capacity to connect with others intergenerationally and cross-culturally. Dedicating your time to activities like reading, outdoor exercise, and indulging or creating art drives your personal development and expands your capacity for authentic social connection, assigning you more value than being a consumer of a harmful lifestyle  

What separation from this culture takes is individual effort to explore discomfort in social roles and interests. Connecting with others in your free time should contribute to the pursuit and development of the activities you value in your life, they should not act as a social crutch to keep you mindless. 

Avoid simplifying your purpose into grooming, eating and playing rage cage. If you genuinely possess the privilege of occupational and economic security, leverage it to generate a positive impact on your community. Continue to pursue goals that extend past fulfilling a capacity to work hard, and direct your interest to create authentic connection to those who live outside your utopia.