Believe it or not, this is an article about hope. For hope to last, however, I believe that it must be earned. We thus begin someplace far from its optimistic light: over the vacation, Cherwell reported that 38% of Oxford students have experienced worse mental health since they arrived at the University. (“Only 38%?!”, we say in unison.) This may seem a baffling statistic to some outsiders – for instance, the unrelenting @oxford_uni commenters who seemingly spend their lives begging the university’s social media team to let them in. After all, by virtually all accounts, Oxford is one of the best universities in the world. Regardless of rankings of questionable validity, we undeniably bear regular witness to thousands of hopeful families making pilgrimages to our city, hoping to manifest erudite futures for their young, impressionable children. This – what we have achieved – is all they want. So why, once here, in a position of ostensibly great privilege, are we so unhappy?
Here, many will posit different theories. Some will blame excess workload. I suspect this may play some role, but it’s also an easy scapegoat with an inherent conflict of interest. On the other end of the spectrum, some self-appointed pedagogical experts on the Internet – coming out of the woodwork at every opportunity to shake their wrinkled fists – will blame the ‘laziness of the youth!’. I believe this answer is also misguided. (But don’t mistake my rejection of Boomer logic for permission to keep scrolling on your phone after reading this. We do, unfortunately, have to lock in.) Closer to the psychological mark, some will offer ‘impostor syndrome’ as the root source of our distress. I don’t think this is entirely wrong, but (1) because it wouldn’t lend cleanly to the conclusion I want to reach, (2) the editors are disillusioned by it, and (3) it’s my actual belief, I theorise that impostor syndrome is just one manifestation of the greater psychological issue at play.
The issue starts with our personalities (ouch): classically high-achieving institutions like Oxford select individuals with higher levels of neuroticism (in the technical sense), a mental breeding ground for overthinking. This lends us creative and analytic abilities which can be harnessed to engineer great innovations, but it can also exacerbate real or perceived conflicts within us and with others, serving as a source of great (often unnecessary) stress. This can be bad enough on its own, but luckily for us – it gets worse. In the individual, neuroticism increases the likelihood and frequency with which we become conscious of what philosophers like Camus term ‘the absurd’ – the feeling that the human condition, with our yearning for clarity in an irrational world, is a meaningless, Sisyphean task.
You likely worked hard to get to Oxford, perhaps grinding many years in preparation for your eventual application. But once you got here, the door opened to yet another application cycle, Russian doll style. Now you’re so caught up preparing for the next stage that you hardly have time to enjoy what you worked for so long to achieve. To make matters worse, maybe you’re getting rejected from internship after internship and don’t know why. Or, maybe you already have your post-Oxford plans confirmed, but you’ve realised that what follows is just another hedonic treadmill, wrapped in postgraduate or corporate packaging. This, you realise, is a cycle which continues until you die.
Bit dramatic, you might think to yourself – and what do we do with this information? (Here’s the preachy part.) Fundamentally, I think it’s difficult to argue with the assertion that “nothing matters”. I do not, however, believe that this reality constitutes a reason to despair, nor does it prescribe a nihilistic life of crime or other ‘amoral’ activities. If life has no meaning, we have the freedom to dictate our own purpose and create our own happiness. The main problem is that a lot of the time, we’ve been conditioned to look for these things in the wrong places. The cognitive trap I’ve found myself falling into time and time again is thinking that the external world is solely deterministic of my internal state. That, for example, getting into Oxford would make me happy. Sure, for a moment I was overjoyed; but in a world devoid of its own meaning, lasting happiness doesn’t come from simply ‘having’. Happiness is not something exclusively reserved for those who get into a top-tier university – that would be ridiculous – or even those who get the perfect job or partner. Happiness is internally generated; you can create it anywhere.
So, what fills you with joy whenever you do it? Whatever it is, maybe you can join me and try to incorporate a little more of it into your life this year. And full disclosure: if that statistic is anything less than 38% next year, I’ll be taking full credit. I close, as promised, with Camus on a hopeful note: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
