I live in Pforzheimer House (Pfoho), one of Harvard’s 12 houses, and this semester we’ve started a program called Pfoho Repflections. In the dining hall right after dinner, students give short speeches on any topic that’s personally meaningful to them.
Last week, I had the privilege of delivering a Pfoho repflection. A video and transcript of my speech follow; I hope they provoke some thought and discussion.
My friend in the intro Hindi course called me up one evening. “I need help — do you know any Hindi?”
After a little stammering I admitted, “I understand it, but I can’t speak it.” I make the same sheepish admission whenever I meet relatives in India or family friends in the US.
Makes sense when you think about it. I’ve never needed to speak Hindi or my family’s native language, Gujarati. My parents, my aunts and uncles, and even my grandparents speak perfectly good English. They’ve always spoken to me in Gujarati and I’ve always responded in English. Fortunately I’ve gotten a good passive understanding of Hindi and Gujarati through these conversations and Indian movies and the like. In India I even taught myself to read and write these languages. But I still can’t communicate the smallest thought to anyone.
Most of my Indian friends make the same admission I do with their respective native languages. We never speak Hindi in college. We call each other bhai (brother), but we never follow up with a real Hindi sentence. We’re experts in Spanish, French, Arabic, you name it — just not Hindi. We’re so invested in Indian culture, but we’re missing the most important part.
Meanwhile, my Chinese friends took third-year Chinese in freshman year and casually switch to Chinese with their friends, and my Hispanic friends are totally fluent in Spanish.
I recently started teaching myself Hindi through an online tutorial. It’s run by a white guy from Alabama. I really should have learned this by now.
If you looked at my calendar freshman year, you’d have noticed I spent most of my time running between Indian events, studying sessions with other computer science students (who were overwhelmingly white and Asian), and dinners with my friends (who were always upper-middle-class like me.)
I skipped one of those dinners one evening in April to go to this event at the admissions office. I’d just gotten randomly sorted into one of the upperclassman houses where I’d be living for the next three years, and since it was nearby I decided to go there for dinner. A girl who said she had also been sorted into my house came with me. I learned later I’d met her once before, but I didn’t remember her at all.
We talked for hours over dinner and started spending so much time together that, by the end of the school year (which was only about three weeks later), she’d become one of the best friends I’d met that entire seven-month-long school year. We hung out at our house’s formal dance, ate together while railing about life all the time, and spent hours trying (and failing) to study for finals. I learned everything about her, including that she’s part Native American and a first-generation college student.
We quickly realized that our schedules led us to run into each other at least three times a day. “We’ve probably been seeing each other everywhere this year,” we told each other once. “Why didn’t we meet earlier?”
The next time I opened my calendar app I knew why. The only people I ever met were Indians, computer scientists, or upper-middle-class people. In other words, people exactly like me. The only reason I’d actually gotten to know her was pure dumb luck — that one-in-twelve chance that threw us into the same house.
I was so thankful for that dumb luck, but I started wondering just how many amazing people like her I’d been seeing, but never meeting, all year.
A lot, probably.
One time my friend — she’s Pakistani — took me to her sorority formal. I wasn’t very surprised that she was the only brown girl at the dance, I was less surprised that I was the only brown guy there, and I was even less surprised that we were together.
She went around introducing me to all her friends in the sorority and their dates, and though I forgot everyone’s name as soon as I moved on to the next person I remember very clearly how conveniently paired up everyone was. Black and black, Asian and Asian, white and white, and for us, brown and brown. It’s like a game of Memory: find the two things that match, pair them together, and you win.
I got separated from her once but she was pretty easy to pick out from the crowd. As I weaved through the crowd to find her I wondered if everyone I was bumping into could automatically tell that we were together or if she’d felt compelled to make sure that her guy matched not only her dress but also her skin tone.
Whenever I showed my friends the photos from the formal, they gushed that the photos were so cute and we fit so well together that I should have made one of them my profile picture. Of course we fit well together. We were a Memory pair.
Harvard’s admitted students weekend, Visitas, was a pretty intimidating time: you were thrown into a huge, unfamiliar place with thousands of people you might never see again and without any place to start building your network.
I was, understandably, scared out of my mind whenever I went into the cavernous dining hall and stood amidst hundreds of incoming freshmen, none of whom I knew. So that was why I’d make a beeline for a table full of Indian people or, at least, one Indian person who looked friendly and had an open seat next to them. That way you’d be guaranteed to have at least one thing in common and they wouldn’t be surprised when you showed up. That strategy was how I met the guy who ended up becoming my best friend in college.
We went to a reception for all the Mid-Atlantic students and soon headed back to the dining hall with some new faces in tow. As we stood outside the serving line we realized that every one of those faces were brown. “We always end up surrounded by Indians,” my best-friend-to-be and I joked.
That night I went to an event at one of the upperclassman houses. I was walking with this white guy and, as I got close to the house, ran into a vaguely Indian-looking girl who was walking with a cadre of white girls. She and I peeled away and started talking about our shared love for Bollywood movies. That’s how I ran into another of my best friends.
The only other good friend I made at Visitas is Chinese. I met her when we accidentally ran into each other at a science symposium and started talking about our interest in computer science and government until all the presenters took their boards down and kicked us out. Good thing we had that random run-in because otherwise I’d never have been inclined to pick her out of a crowd.
Everyone wants to be told they’re doing something right with their lives — we all want validation. We’re always looking for a good grade to show we’re doing well in school (whatever that means), a good job offer to prove that we are making something of our careers, Facebook likes and messages to remind us that we have friends, compliments to show us that other people think we’re desirable, and so on. Nothing wrong with wanting a pat on the back every so often, right?
I think there’s something sinister here — something really damaging to your self-esteem and all too prevalent in the minds of college students and young people trying to make a name for themselves. I struggled with this “something sinister” a lot in my first year at college, as did a lot of my friends, but I could never really put my finger on what it was. Toward the end of the year, my good friend — who’s been an incredible mentor — explained why this happens and what we can do about it. I’ll do my best to recount and dig into that here.
So first, these validations I mentioned — grades, job offers, compliments, etc. — are called “affirmations:” external, tangible, measurable indicators of success that grant you temporary emotional support and “affirm” your value to you. In a nutshell, affirmations remind you that you’re good at something, which makes you feel better about yourself.
That’s all well and good, but problems arise once you start relying on affirmations. If you feel better about yourself when you get an affirmation, then you’ll inevitably feel worse when you don’t get one: it’s like when you start feeling unpopular or unwanted when you can’t find any friends to sit with at lunch, for instance, even though you know perfectly well that you do have friends. Building off that, you need a constant stream of affirmations to feel good: no matter how many good grades you’ve gotten, one bad one might still crush your belief that you’re a good student. And, worst of all, they’re largely out of your control: if someone’s not interested in you, it could be for a thousand reasons, none of which include that you aren’t desirable. Tethering your happiness to affirmations is ultimately destructive to your self-esteem.
So why is this mindset everywhere, especially in college? Why don’t we just abandon it if it causes us unhappiness? And, most vitally for our own lives, what do we do about it?
People in college can get obsessed with affirmations, and I think that’s because you had to have that mindset to get into college in the first place. Getting into college — especially a prestigious one — is your primary goal during high school. And, like with most all-consuming goals, you start tying your notion of self-worth to how close you are to achieving that goal. As important as being a curious, intelligent person is, you still achieve that goal of getting into college in large part by hitting concrete, easily-measured checkpoints: what was your GPA? what was your SAT score? did you become president of that club? did you win that award? and so on. So these concrete checkpoints become affirmations for you; each time you hit one, you feel better about yourself because you know you’re moving one step closer to the goal you’ve tethered your self-worth to. Win the award? You’re a champion, you’ll get in anywhere. Miss out on the presidency? You can’t do this leadership thing. This mindset, damaging as it is, carries over into college.
Zooming out, if you grow up in this American society, it’s hard to avoid becoming addicted to affirmations even if college isn’t always on the forefront of your mind. American society, especially the media, tends to push this “success = self-worth” mantra. We’re always busy turning the people who achieved something flashy into the hero of the day: the kid who got into all eight Ivy League schools, that entrepreneur who just earned millions, or that movie star who just became a role model for millions by inking a deal to a new film. That mentality creeps into schools, too. The charismatic presidents of clubs are hailed as great people, while those who don’t get the best grades or don’t have people flocking around them are called losers. Our society is so centered on trying to be better than other people that everyone tries to find ways to measure themselves that everyone else can see (how attractive they are, how prestigious their job is, what expensive stuff they own, etc.) and starts feeling that their personal self-worth is tied to how high they stand on these various scales. You can see this in our unhealthy obsession with status symbols or problems with body image — they’re just more examples of people relying on praise from others to validate their self-worth.
If we zoom out even further, desiring affirmations is a human thing. Everyone wants to feel successful, and the reasonable way to convince our order-loving brains is to measure everything and start comparing yourself to others. Attach a number or a yes/no to something (how many likes or friends you have, whether you got the job you wanted) and it’s easy to measure.
So take a situation where people are concerned about measuring, comparing, and achieving, and they’ll inevitably start tying their self-worth to affirmations.
Waiting for other people to judge you and then using those judgments to make hasty, ill-founded snap decisions on your character is hardly a good way to build self-esteem. Surely there’s another way — another mindset you can adopt to develop a genuine, stable sense of self-worth.
First, the two major underlying problems with affirmations is precisely that they are external and measurable; that is, they’re largely out of your control and they measure the side effects of your character traits and not the underlying traits themselves. For example, if you’re looking to measure how desirable you are by how many people compliment or show interest in you (a reasonable affirmation to rely on), that’s misleading because people could be not showing their interest in you for a variety of reasons (or maybe you don’t even notice), plus that is at best an indirect way of measuring what you cared about in the first place. And, as a result, you start chasing these affirmations instead of focusing on developing the character traits that really matter. You get into situations where people show interest in you, but perhaps not for the right reasons, and you lose sight of becoming a better person, which would help you more toward your goal.
How do you avoid the problems that come with external and measurable sources of validation? Well, turn that on its head and use internal, unmeasurable sources of validation, aka gut feelings. This is easiest to explain with examples. If you’re smart, you shouldn’t need grades to prove that — you’ll just know that, for instance, you understand what you’re learning in school and your mind learns quickly. If you’re a good friend, you can just feel that from how you connect with others or how you’ve helped friends in their times of need; you don’t need to count how many texts you got from them. When you use gut feelings, you trust yourself and your knowledge of what really matters instead of relying on fickle, unreliable affirmations. You get a more nuanced view of yourself instead of just assigning yourself a number, and if your self-worth comes from within it’s much less likely to rise and fall randomly. That’s a recipe for a genuine, stable sense of self-worth.
This isn’t a perfect mindset, of course. First, it’s hard to trust your gut, especially when the world is telling you otherwise. And second, these criteria you use to think about yourself are necessarily vague and hard to measure, so it’s hard to know what to consider (what innate criteria can you use to measure your desirability?) or if you’re thinking about things correctly. So there’s some room for affirmations here; they provide proof for your assertions, which helps to an extent, and they keep your inner worldview in sync with the outer world. You just have to look at the average of many observations and not just the extreme cases (e.g. look at what kind of grades you consistently get instead of fixating on that one bad one.)
This mindset of building a concept of self-worth from within is a hard one to adopt, but I think it’s ultimately worth it because it helps make you a more self-reliant, more self-aware person with stronger self-esteem. I don’t think you can switch to the “gut feeling” mindset overnight, but it’s a good start to see the differences between internal and external sources of validation and to know what’s an affirmation and when you’re seeking them.
Ask almost any college student and they’ll tell you they’re suffering from this mysterious, ill-defined affliction called the Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO for short. It’s especially rampant at colleges full of high-achieving students. I like to joke that Harvard invented FOMO, but we actually did.
My entire freshman year I knew I suffered from an acute case of FOMO but could never put my finger on what that meant. In this post I want to figure out what exactly FOMO means, where it stems from, and especially what we can do about it.
FOMO is a difficult thing to put your finger on, and as such everyone’s definition of FOMO differs. The standard definition is that FOMO is the feeling that you’re missing out on a certain fun or meaningful event or experience. It’s a very specific, very isolated event, the definition goes.
But I think that FOMO is much more than just a series of isolated incidents. Nothing is ever just an isolated event. FOMO is the result of a mindset, or the sum of several broader, deeper fears. It’s a chronic affliction. But what exactly is it, then?
Let’s step through some of the instances where I feel FOMO. My friends are going to a party but didn’t invite me. I get a Snapchat from my friends doing something fun but without me there. I see a photo of someone with a bunch of friends at a great event having a lot of fun while I’m just sitting around — or, even worse, doing something that’s fun but not as fun. I’m at an event and my “friends” always ditch me for something or someone more interesting. I find out someone visited my area and met up with other friends but not with me. I realize someone else has more friends than me. I realize that I’m locked out of a clique that it seems desirable to be part of. I realize someone else knows one of my good friends far better than I do, or that someone I consider a close friend values someone else far more than me.
A pretty clear mindset emerges. You feel like you’re not making the best use of your time; you could be having more fun. You feel excluded. You feel unpopular. You feel like you’re falling behind in this rat race where everyone’s seeking out good experiences. You feel like you have fewer friends than the next guy. You feel like you’re doing less with your life than everyone else, and that’s a bad thing. Basically, you feel inadequate. FOMO is, I think, a general feeling of social inadequacy, the feeling that social life is a competition and you’re losing. It’s partially natural (it’s natural to feel a little inferior) but greatly exacerbated by the constant, graphic, crushing reminders that everyone else is doing better than you.
FOMO is a really damaging mindset to have. It seems especially prevalent among young, high-achieving people (usually college students), and since the term was only coined this century it’s clear something about this modern world has made its prevalence skyrocket as of late. So what’s causing it?
Social media definitely has some role to play. In this digital age, you can see at the tap of a button exactly what everyone in your network is doing, and with the ever-growing role social media plays in our culture, these reminders are constant. The most obvious offender is Facebook — just open it up and you’ll see people plastering their timelines with hundreds of photos of them having good times with their friends at events you definitely weren’t invited to. Facebook makes this addictive; it’s so easy to jump on Facebook and get caught up for hours reliving the experiences of others, which is a recipe for aggravating FOMO — and, ironically, it eats up time you could have been spending doing the kind of thing you’re jealous other people are doing.
I think the even worse offender is Snapchat and its Stories. For the uninitiated, any Snapchat user can post Snaps to their Story, which all their friends can see for the next 24 hours. What’s scary about Stories is that, whenever you open Snapchat, you instantly have access to dozens and dozens of 10-second bites of FOMO. That is, Snapchat provides the same amount of FOMO as any other social media service, but the sheer quantity is overwhelming. In the course of 5 minutes you could probably watch 75 Snaps (assuming 4 seconds per Snap, which is pretty reasonable), each of which shows a different person appearing to be having more fun than you in a different way with different people. It’s crushing and, as any Snapchat user will tell you, you can’t tear yourself away. Snapchat Stories can tend to become a huge FOMO competition: after seeing everyone else posting FOMO-inducing pictures, you have the implicit incentive to post photos of yourself having as much fun as possible so that you can say that you, too, have lots of friends and are having a good time. And that makes everyone else who views your Snap feel a little more FOMO and feel like they have to upload even more fun photos, creating a vicious cycle where everyone tries to outdo each other.
So part of it is definitely this modern digital age, where it’s extremely easy to be caught up in consuming others’ experiences instead of creating your own. Social media has increased the rate at which FOMO-aggravating events occur to us. But it still doesn’t fully account for what causes FOMO in the first place.
For that, let’s step back to the environment of college, which I think is a major cause of the emotions behind FOMO. Not only is social media everywhere (it’s the dominant form of keeping up with friends, after all), but also the culture of the place is very conducive to FOMO. There’s the general feeling in college that these are the “best four years of your life,” so you better be making the most of those. But how do you know if you’re doing enough or if you’re doing the right things? The only obvious standard for comparison is the people around you — and, just like that, college turns into a competition.
Indeed, college — especially a place like Harvard — is a very competitive place, and people tend to turn everything into a competition. Who’s doing the most difficult classes, who’s leading the most clubs, who’s having the most fun, who’s the busiest, and so on. It’s hard not to get FOMO when you peer at someone’s calendar and see that they have way more meetings, dinners, parties, and dates scheduled than you. But I think the most interesting thing to look at is how people turn social life into a competition: people compete over who has the most friends and the tightest relationships with them. You feel like you have to have more friends than other people in your network, or that if you’re not currently spending time with someone you’re falling behind since everyone else is cultivating relationships at the same time, or that the primary goal of the place is to build your network as much as possible (or at least more than everyone else), or that whoever has less friends is obviously less cool or less popular or less compelling of a person. I think this feeling is everywhere. I’m certainly guilty of it: I’ll meet people for dinner because I want to catch up with them, sure, but there’s always the underlying relief that, phew, I’m not stuck alone or without dinner plans that night. I can’t tell you how much more relaxed and comfortable I am during the day when I have lunch or dinner plans already set.
But FOMO applies even beyond college, so it’s not just the college atmosphere that causes it. I think a unique confluence of factors makes college the zenith of FOMO, but there’s something in the human psyche and in society that makes FOMO constantly present. The idea of comparing yourself to others certainly decreases as you get more years under your belt (with which you can compare yourself now to yourself in the past), but it never quite goes away. There’s also something to be said for the natural human desire for acceptance, something that might be at its peak during the turbulent years of college but that, again, is still in high supply throughout the rest of life. You want to convince yourself that you have friends and that you’re accepted by social groups, but when you see others appearing to have more friends or a stronger network than you that notion comes crashing down, making you feel inadequate. People are also innately cliquey, and feeling excluded from a clique — especially the people you call your close friends —- always hurts.
So FOMO is a universal problem rooted in your mindset. It stems from the very innate, very human need to be connected, accepted, and included. It’s accentuated by the environment of college, where comparing yourself to others is at its worst. And it’s even more exacerbated by the rise of social media, which bombards you with glimpses of the best parts of everyone else’s lives. The combination of innate feelings of inadequacy, the need to compete to feel less inadequate, and the constant reminders that you are indeed losing this competition make FOMO crushing and unavoidable for college students nowadays.
It’s impossible to avoid FOMO without changing your mindset, because it’s the mindset that ultimately causes FOMO. So instead of avoiding we should aim to rise above FOMO. Broadly, I think you should seek to have an internally-sourced concept of self-worth, since FOMO is all about feeling inadequate compared to others due to external indicators. You can try, to repeat a somewhat trite (but true!) line, to compare yourself against yourself and not against others. These two mindset shifts are really hard to accomplish. It might be easier to focus on making your relationships and experiences more meaningful instead of just more numerous. That is, you accept that you might not have as large a network or as packed a calendar as the next guy, but your relationships with your friends are deep and strong and the things you do have meaning to you. Changing your mindset in this way too is hard, but I’d argue it leads to improved relationships too.
I think one of the best things you can do is be one of those rare inclusive people who strives to not give other people FOMO. Instead of just telling everyone how you’re going to this party with some people and are going to have such a great time, invite others along. Open up your cliques to people who want to be part. I think people are really drawn to those inclusive, supportive people who help them avoid FOMO. I know I am. They’re just good people.
FOMO is such a complex, difficult, deeply-rooted problem that it isn’t going away anytime soon for anyone. But I think there are things you can do to combat it. If nothing else, I think the most important thing to do is to just talk to people about FOMO, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned at college it’s that everyone else feels the same way that you do, though they might just be afraid to voice it.