leaving

something about communities

also on mit admissions

two weeks ago i was walking through the infinite corridor at night and i thought about how absurd it was that i was even allowed to be there at that hour. when you’re a kid and it’s nighttime you’re basically only allowed to be at home or at friends’ places or in public spaces like open stores and the outdoors; this is mostly true for adults as well, except i suppose they’re also allowed to be in the office. but when you’re a college student, for a brief time you can basically do whatever you want on campus at any time, and i did not realize how unusual this was until recently

all of which begs the question: how do people who graduate deal with no longer having all this at their fingertips? how do people transition from being at one of the greatest intellectual hubs on the planet to returning to the rest of the world, or from the freedom of being a college student to the structure of regular adult life?

one answer is to avoid leaving school, to stay in the world of academia with masters degrees and phds and professorships. that’s not a path i’m considering right now, mostly because i don’t feel like i have enough technical ability or conviction to pull it off, but maybe i’ll come back to it in a few years

another possible answer is to leave school but to not move on. my friend once told me that the reason some new grads party so much is because they’re trying to pretend they’re still in school. a lot of people have told me “college is the best four years of your life” and i think that’s an extremely dangerous mentality to have because it encourages you to become fixated on the past, but it seems to be commonly held anyway

there are probably plenty of other answers out there. for example, if you asked me three years ago i would’ve said something like adult life sucks and you should just accept that without thinking too hard about whatever else you’ve experienced. that’s not a view i resonate with anymore, but for a while it was something i really believed in

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i’ve seen many attempts at community-building over the last few years. i’ve lived in some coliving houses that felt like paradise, and other coliving houses that just felt like a bunch of people using the same space. i’ve seen a lot of clubs at mit successfully adjust to covid, and also started my own club for making viral educational content which completely failed (though i’ll be starting another club similar in spirit soon!)

most recently, some of my friends who live near mit (they aren’t students) have been hosting weekly gatherings where we catch up and eat food and usually end up talking about brains or physics or something like that. it’s consistently one of the highlights of my week, and one time i remember thinking if this was what my life next year was like - being able to nerd out with genuine, wholesome people on a regular basis -  i wouldn’t feel as bad about leaving mit. of course there’s still a lot about this place i would miss, but at least that loss would feel bearable; i wouldn’t feel nearly as lost or ungrounded as i would otherwise

in one of my favorite episodes of the anthropocene reviewed, john green discusses a commencement address vonnegut gave: 

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

when i first listened to this episode around two years ago, i didn’t understand why vonnegut thought community-building was a daring endeavor. it’s hard to really appreciate what he means here until you experience for yourself how bad the terrible disease of loneliness is and how hard community-building is and how transformative it can be when done well. i definitely didn’t understand these things at the time, though now i do

so this is my answer now: you don’t get over no longer being in a place like mit by running away from the problem or by pretending you haven’t left or by giving up altogether; you do it by creating new communities that you love, to fill the holes left by the ones you can no longer be a part of

“When people ask me why I live in Indianapolis when I could live anywhere, that’s what I want to tell them. I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured, and you gotta do that somewhere. When I am sick with the disease of loneliness, good weather and shimmering skyscrapers do me no good whatsoever, as a writer or as a person. I must be home to do the work I need to do. And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before, and you live in after. But home is also what you are building and maintaining today, and I feel rather lucky in the end to be making my home [here]”