Life is hard. No matter what your field of study is, your week is packed with classes, meetings, chores and then also having to figure out what you will do after crossing the stage at graduation. In the current economic and political climate, these pressures of everyday life feel even more suffocating — who has the time or “bandwidth” to think beyond their immediate needs and demands in an imminent recession?
Sadly, we must allot time and energy to more than just the immediate, more than just the animal comfort. If anything, the moment demands us to.
In the past few decades, the pace of life has picked up tremendously. We are constantly bombarded by information and stimuli and come back to them like the addicts we are. I and my 24-pack of Red Bull sitting under my bed are equally guilty of this. For most people in my age range, the double whammy of coming of age during a global pandemic and nationwide protests has numbed us to the core. I know it did me, as I watched the world burn from my parents’ office as I was graduating high school online exactly 5 years ago.
“Girl, the tariffs,” “PC Small Group,” “Just a chill guy,” “Aura farming.”
Every bit of material reality feels to have been reduced to a joke where our increasing mental instability is the sole punchline. Nothing is real, nothing matters. The “vibebification” of it all persists. People have yelled at the sky about these sorts of issues for centuries, but the pace and intensity of it are unique here. Our collective willingness to delegate critical thinking to Generative AI is not helping either.
And why does any of this critique even matter if the machine seems to be somewhat still drudging along in spite of everything I said? In my five years of being involved on campus, the most demoralizing pattern I have seen has easily been mass apathy. People talk about issues and how they want them to be fixed, but they are very rarely — if ever — willing to sacrifice their own comfort to do so. People will complain on and on and on about problems they are encountering, but will not care to lift a finger to fix them, especially if some sort of collective angle exists. Comfort — particularly mental comfort — is prioritized above anything else.
We are virtualizing every serious event outside of ourselves as some sort of meme. When we acknowledge the reality of these events, it is only as something far and distant from us that we cannot act upon anyways. This is a coping mechanism to keep us from dealing with the discomfort that comes with understanding and processing them.
We willfully discount the nuance and complexity in the world for our own comfort. Curiosity, critical thinking, and intellectual honesty are being replaced with vibes, instant gratification and mental laziness. This is exactly what I mean by anti-intellectualism. A willful process of flattening reality into whatever is the easiest and most digestible here in the moment, with no concern for truth itself.
Living in a world of absolutes, where complexity and mutability is removed from everything is depressing. We also strip it from one another, not allowing ourselves to be human. Every part of ourselves and our life is ordained to serve some sort of self-assigned function, where we do not allow wiggle room for the bits of reality that we dislike to exist. You are supposed to respond to ABC events with XYZ emotions. You must follow this path to obtain that.
Not only do we follow these preordained conventions, but we butcher each other when we dare get off the beaten path, fraying the very fibers of each other to the point of exhaustion for a bit of “harmless” fun. We police our behavior and thoughts so that we can maintain not even blissful ignorance — because I know most people are not ignorant — but blissful detachment, blissful nonchalance. It is an embarrassment and a social crime to particularly care about anything.
If your knee-jerk reaction to this is just to claim that I am “thinking too much into it” — I think my point is only proven right. We must engage and play with ideas foreign to us. There is value in understanding and dissecting something new, something that could potentially give us new insights and perspective. This is how you build up mental fortitude and critical thinking. The humanities — history, art, literature, etc — they exist to give us a training space for these.
Our collective willingness of consistently discounting them and laughing off any attempt at “reading between the lines” for new meaning in a work is a willful abandonment of our mental agency and development. Despite being part of STEM, I will gladly die on the hill that my ability to succeed in my field mainly comes from having to intellectually engage with the world around me and continuing to do so. I hope that more of us will continue doing so because I know every living human being has the capability to do so. We just have to refocus from solely critical thinking and engagement as an aesthetically pleasing virtue to something we care to practice here and now.
Lastly, as I hope I have already made it obvious, anti-intellectualism is antithetical to our ability to grow and educate ourselves. Our education and growth are essential to the functioning of a democratic society. As Thomas Jefferson said, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”
