Daily Trojan Magazine
The college loneliness crisis
Why is it so hard for our generation to find community?
By INDIA BROWN
My admission to USC was unconventional, at least by my standards. I got the email while visiting the University of St Andrews in Scotland — a wonderful school, I’m sure, but after spending some bleak March days roaming the campus, trying to contort my ideals of college to fit a new environment, I became disillusioned with its foreignness. I knew I didn’t want to be there, yet I had nowhere else to go.
USC was a Hail Mary — an “option” that would warrant no choice, a utopia of West Coast sunshine impossibly far from a Scottish school on the dark shores of the North Sea. In the evening I was set to find out, my mother and I coped with the anxiety by getting drunk off mojitos from the hotel bar. When I got accepted, we were so hammered and thrilled that I barely noticed or cared that it was for the following spring, not the fall.
But as time went on, I started to worry about what exactly I’d do in that first semester. I settled on living in University Gateway Apartments, the popularity of which I wasn’t aware, and taking online classes at Santa Monica College. I knew little about the nuances of life at USC and imagined myself alone in a sterile apartment on my computer, in a city I wasn’t familiar with, adjacent to a school I didn’t go to. That idea felt isolating and depressingly adult, as though my experience was beginning at most college students’ end.
Luckily, I was proven wrong. I found great roommates — through Instagram — I made wonderful friends — with the help of one I knew from home — and I realized that my path to USC was not so unconventional. There were spring admits and Trojan Transfers all throughout my building, my virtual classroom and the University events I attended. My introduction to college was by no means lonely, and my point is not to whine about the hardships of enrolling in one of the world’s most prestigious universities a semester late. Rather, I was fascinated — and slightly shocked — by how well established these auxiliary avenues to graduating really are. Of course, I wasn’t expecting a small liberal arts school with a thousand students — more resources mean more opportunities, and in many ways, the varied paths to securing a USC degree imply a culture of diversity, possibility and inclusion perhaps limited by the nature of other colleges.
But I did wonder if these smaller schools have something USC lacks: an inherent sense of community, a built-in way to meet others, a feeling of safety and belonging within a collective that you don’t have to seek out for yourself. I wondered if USC’s industry-centric ethos sacrificed something socially if the “me” generation was siloed from making meaningful connections through our circumstances and the United States’ emphasis on the self and hyperindividualism.
But I knew these feelings were not unique to my university. I heard stories from friends at schools far and wide expressing the same sentiments of isolation and a status quo of inauthenticity. It seemed as if USC was a microcosm of an epidemic of loneliness in higher education around the country. And what a paradox that is, that college — a privileged opportunity for young people to live among each other, to find a sense of self on the delicate precipice of adulthood — was not exempt from the plights of our generation.
In a Daily Trojan survey of the USC community, 71% of the 39 respondents said that college was lonelier than they expected it to be; 81% said they had to seek out a strong sense of community, and it wasn’t inherent to the college experience; 56% said that the coronavirus pandemic affected the way in which students socialize at college, while more than a quarter said they were unsure of its ramifications. Clearly, USC students resonated with my observations. Of course, community and belonging must be sought out to some degree, but perhaps our generation was particularly burdened by sentiments of loneliness unseen in years prior for reasons out of our control.
Most current university students were high schoolers during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. We were adolescents, a phase of life so plagued with insecurity, self-consciousness and comparison to others that it’s become its own cliché — the adversities of which are the subject of countless movies, TV shows and stand-up routines.
Simultaneously, we were barred from physical interaction, and addictive social media apps like TikTok were at the dawn of their popularity. The confluence of these phenomena at such a vulnerable stage of development created the perfect storm; amid the isolation of a global pandemic, tech billionaires were happy to offer virtual connections to a generation yearning for real ones.
So, for years, our plane of social existence shifted from the physical world to the digital one, the two-dimensional quasi-reality we unlock every day and subconsciously absorb with the emotional weight of real life. But it’s not real life, and because we know that, we’re fine, right?
Wrong. The rise of social media preceded the coronavirus pandemic and most likely would’ve run the same course in due time without it. But the collision of its availability and a sudden need to rely on the digital space exacerbated its effect on our generation in ways we might only be just realizing. Its addictive consequences on the brain can be likened to hard drugs, and our dependence on it at such naive ages has utterly altered the way our generation connects with each other and seeks community.
As I mentioned earlier, I found my freshman-year roommate through Instagram. This is not uncommon — many USC students can recall their year’s “Class of 20XX” Instagram page with slight embarrassment, where incoming freshmen could “meet” each other through introductory posts displaying their best pictures and descriptions of their backgrounds, interests, etc.
One could argue that this is a positive tool, for it could expose you to your future classmates and help you build connections before arriving on campus. The roommate I found through Instagram ended up being one of my best friends, and I wouldn’t have known her without social media.
But too often, we fail to ask what the darker implications of this kind of judgment are. We prioritize our digital life as if we are still locked inside, forced to social distance, unable to interact physically, but we aren’t. We’ve allowed our existence in this second space to infiltrate our actual realities, and as a consequence, we’re more isolated than ever.
If you asked me why I chose my roommate based on her Instagram profile, I would probably stumble through a generic answer about how “cute” or “fun” she seemed. In actuality, I’d be misrepresenting the embarrassingly superficial truth, which is that I inferred from her follower count that she was “normal,” from her profile that she was conventionally attractive and from her collection of curated photos that she had the sort of life I’d like to be part of.
Notice how these judgments make me sound like a moral cretin with shallow values? But no reader can blame me (I pray) because we all do this daily on some microcosmic level. The narcotic rush of social media drives us away from meaningful connection and further into self-consciousness, artifice and ultimately, isolation. We don’t post because we live our lives; we live our lives to post. Who cares if you met a new friend at a party so long as you snapped a picture that made your fragile ratio of followers think it was fun.
We have conditioned ourselves into believing that a comment or a follow equates to a friendship, and a “like” indicates genuine interest. Yet we, as both producers and receivers of social media, perform these interactions thoughtlessly, knowing they hold little value but remain too vain to remember that when it concerns us personally. That vanity is really just insecurity, and as a result, we are paralyzed in the face of real human connection. We prefer the dark and lonely comedown of our digital addiction because the high is too good to ignore — the compliments too abundant, the validation too sweet to refuse.
We have sacrificed community and become so fragmented that how college seems trumps how college is, and because we missed important socialization in high school, we don’t even really know what it could be. Coupled with American individuality and USC’s emphasis on industry, we no longer know (or care about) our neighbors, or invest in secondary or even tertiary communities for ourselves.
Isn’t that the entire point of college? When again in your life are you surrounded by thousands of like-minded people willing to collaborate with you, inspire you and motivate you through sheer coexistence? When again can you live in a dorm and knock on a classmate’s door to brainstorm an essay or work out a math problem?
These notions seem terrifying and pointless in our generation’s delusion, yet they are the most integral part of a well-spent college experience. Without community, the institution of higher education may as well exist entirely behind a screen, and USC’s campus can just be bulldozed to make room for more fast food chains and Mac repair stores. Lord knows we’ll need them.
