Sophomore physiology and neurobiology major
With Thanksgiving right around the corner, it truly is a time to be thankful for and cognizant of the privileges we, college students, are granted today. In fact, if you’re here reading this column, pat yourself on the back because the reality is that we select few are all quite fortunate to be here.
This past Saturday, I was humbly reminded of our luxurious lives when I went to volunteer for Food For All DC, an organization that provides meals to families in need in Washington. In helping those impoverished families, I began to feel more and more guilty of and spoiled by the privileges and materials that I am afforded. I felt this way because in the end, everything I have feels as if it has been intrinsically unearned.
And while yes, fortune smiled on my family and while my parents worked hard to provide for us, I personally have yet to accomplish anything to deserve this sort of decadent lifestyle. I began to feel quite overindulged and rotten, particularly when I began to compare my own problems with the problems of the people whom I was serving in Washington.
In this information age dominated by smartphones, Sperry’s, North Face and other luxury consumer goods, it’s almost too easy to become engrossed with what we do not have. Our technological innovations and social media profiles have provided us with a rather unnecessary platform to compare our lives to those of our peers, and this has made it actually more difficult to differentiate the haves from the have-nots in today’s society.
And indeed, our comparisons with each other over our material possessions and unrelated but linked social happiness has made it too easy for us to forget the things that we do have, and it has caused us to lose sight of the small things in life that are so easily forgettable. In this sense, our social media profiles and our rather homogeneous friendships essentially have allowed us to establish our own little bubbles from which we do not notice those who are less fortunate than us, or as the adage goes, “Out of sight, out of mind.”
And it is our current relationships with peers who hail from more or less the same economic backgrounds that have perpetrated among us these continual “First-World problems” to the point that we have forgotten or subconsciously have chosen to ignore the less fortunate because they are quite literally not within our social media world.
But in the end, the purpose of this column is not to make us all feel bad and guilty over our “First-World problems,” but rather to make us all feel a bit more gracious and content with our lives. So next time you’re feeling stressed out about your failed relationships or exams, try to find the silver lining: While it may seem difficult to find, it certainly exists, and even though things may seem bad now, it unfortunately could always be much, much worse.
Max An is a sophomore physiology and neurobiology major. He can be reached at maxandbk@gmail.com.
