by Kaelynd Brouillette ’29 on February 5, 2026
Opinion - Campus
“College will be the best time of your life!” was a phrase I heard all too often prior to moving into Providence College. Hearing so many stories from my friends who were already in college, my parents, and others engraved the expectation that college would, in fact, be the best time of my life. There was a sense of glorification, like I would have the most fun every moment of every day, which put the pressure on for this sense to come to fruition. College can be fun, exciting, and meaningful, but is it always that way? Absolutely not. The expectation to always be having fun quietly brews pressure under the surface, and when you’re not constantly happy or social, it feels like you’re doing college wrong. PC is not a big campus, meaning that this problem is more visible in our community than others, and comparison becomes unavoidable.
You see the same people everywhere you go, like at Ray Dining Hall, the Phillips Memorial Library, or out on the weekends. That is just the nature of PC. You always know when something is happening, where it is happening, and who is going to be there, making comparison to others ever so present. The small, tight-knit environment of PC turns this idea of “fun” into a measurement, with a feeling of guilt that comes from deciding to stay in and get work done, not having an established group of friends, or feeling like everyone but you has it together. The pressure of the idea that you should always be happy and having fun isn’t always explicit, but it is constant, and you run into it everywhere you go.
No one talks about how mandatory “fun” starts to feel either, like it is some sort of assignment you must complete in order to get an A in social success, metaphorically speaking. There is an overarching assumption that staying in is a waste of a valuable weekend evening, making some parts of college social life feel almost performative. Going out even when you are exhausted or uninterested becomes a habit, with the idea behind it being to do things to say you did them, rather than enjoying your time. All this to say, are you really having the “best time of your life,” or has the going-out and fear-of-missing-out culture victimized you into thinking that fun and joy are something you need to prove, rather than feel?
What often gets lost in the pressure to enjoy every single moment, is how much of college exists in the in-between. Most days are not packed with parties or major milestones, but with quiet routines: walking to class alone, sitting in the library longer than planned, or going to bed at a time that seems like it is earlier than everyone else. These moments don’t match the version of college we think we should be having, leading to that overwhelming resentment that we’re not living up to the pressure that has been artificially set on us by expectations. Nonetheless, these moments are not signs of failure, per se. There are parts of college that don’t appear on everyone’s social media, such as the feeds that are perfectly tailored to give the perception of a perfect life; yet, they make up the majority of the experience. Learning to sit with these moments and appreciate them, rather than resenting them, is arguably where growth actually happens. Maybe, the pressure to have the best time of your life can ruin the time you are actually in.