The Bowdoin Orient

February 9, 2001
Volume CXXXII, Number 15

Go Ahead and Embrace Your Ennui

   "The best four years of your life" rhetoric is a fundraising ploy to induce a nostalgia that will pry open the coffers of alumni. So forget it. Positive thinking is healthy, but over romanticizing, even mythologizing, the college experience, isn't.
   The notion of college as the culmination of our young lives is, while it pretends to be otherwise, a very depressing thought. Would we really want our existence to peak at age twenty-one?
   Rather than motivate us to seize the day, such thinking is more likely to cultivate a sense of lacking. When we craft an idealized vision of "the college experience," we construct an ideal which will always lie beyond our reach. It seems college should be less about grasping after unattainable, fictional pleasures, and more about really immersing ourselves in the joys college life does offer.
   Over idealized visions of college impel us to bemoan our eventual departure, and make us feel guilty if we don't. But really, while it is healthy to retain fond memories of the place, it is equally healthy for us to feel the desire to leave, to move on. And so, if Bowdoin feels a bit constrictive, or a little stale, to seniors, that's good. Embrace the ennui.