Complacency has run rampant. If you’re in Greek life, nearly every piece of clothing you wear is of your organization. You immerse yourself in collectivism and lose the personal touch.
No longer are you John Doe, but rather, a prestigious Chi Omega Kappa. If someone else isn’t, they aren’t worthy of your recognition, even in passing. You are the elite, but the barrier to entry wasn’t that high, provided you were ready to brown nose at the smoker’s events and sign a check over.
If you won Anchor Splash, you’ll be bragging about it behind an anonymous mask on collegeabc.com but I still don’t know what this entails aside from dancing in a pool.
If you answer a question correctly in class, you smirk and bask in the intellectual glory, feeling like you’ve cured cancer or solved complex mathematical problems similar to the efforts of Albert Einstein.
If you’ve gotten an article published in The Miami Hurricane, the New York Post of student news, you decide your prose is as dense as that of JD Salinger. Or if you have a muscular body, you’ll wear as little as possible to prove to other gym-goers that each one of your biceps is in fact larger than your head. OK, granted not everybody is as cocky as this, but it’s pretty overwhelming these days.
Also, did you just achieve something outside of the college bubble and aren’t sure where to boast it to the world? Sure you do. You sprint to your Facebook to keep people ‘posted’ within minutes or even seconds of hearing about some kind of good news to make others abundantly aware, sometimes repeatedly, of how successful you are, but if you ever screw up or are at fault, you’ll never hone up.
What ever happened to modesty and revealing less to the masses than one’s actually made of? I’m not Buddha here either, but there’s a level some people exceed that’s nauseating.
Be loud, be proud, but also know when to just keep your mouth shut and admit you’re just a human being. But for all I care, tweet every time you have a bowel movement. Just remember if it’s only recognition you seek from this life, especially in Miami where half of the praise isn’t genuine and the other half is never put forth, you’re in for one hell of a bumpy ride.
Evan Seaman is a senior majoring in marketing. He may be contacted at eseaman@themiamihurricane.com.