The Opposite of the Opposite of Loneliness
A Commencement Address for People Who Were Very Sad in College
Dear Republic,
Ever loathed the Commencement speaker? Their cheery optimism? Their many friends? Their memorable experiences? If so, this essay is for you.
-ROL
THE OPPOSITE OF THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS
It feels wrong to invoke a name and story as sad as this, for purposes that seem as superficial as these. Just to frame an essay? Just to frame an essay you’ll use the dead? I hope it’s not just framing. I hope this essay doesn’t use Marina Keegan in any way. I hope it’s about her and her message. That’s all I’m trying to do here, is to adjust the frequency of the message to hit people it didn’t originally. Keegan spoke to a black sea of smiling mandarins about the feeling of belonging and possibility that they found at their beautiful old school, and how they could keep this feeling with them after they left; I want to speak to those isolated and regretting people who have never felt this feeling in the first place, let alone worried about losing it.
It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.
This is Marina Keegan’s evocation of the feeling opposite of loneliness. The opposite of loneliness is something diffuse, net-like; the collected interconnections of human lives, and the feeling that you can’t help but be a part of that interconnection — that’s what makes it. You feel the opposite of loneliness because of all of these beautiful memories you make with your friends but you also feel it because the making of memories like these is, itself, a larger enterprise you and your friends and everyone else is a part of and connected by. This is the team you are on, the people who are with you: the living. The opposite of loneliness is acutely feeling this; acutely feeling that you are alive and are engaged in life with others at the same time as others are.
It’s little surprise then that after Marina Keegan’s death at the age of 22 the essay became such a favorite among college students across the world. College is understood by most people to be, after all, a neat little rectangle of four years in a person’s life, roughly self-contained, which is earmarked for the specific purpose of figuring out who one is and what to do with the remainder of one’s time. The sense of camaraderie which seems so intimate to the opposite of loneliness is therefore very common to college students; they all recognize — and are told over and over and over again to recognize — that they are in this very special circumstance together, in this very special time of their lives. Maria’s song to this feeling — how could it help but speak to college students, and speak to them so surely?
I want to speak to college students too — and everyone who will listen, really — but I want to speak to a particular population of college students whom, I suspect, have not a clue as to what Keegan is talking about. Or, more accurately, they think they know all too well what Keegan is talking about, and so the sentiments expressed in her essay make them feel something cold in their guts when they read it, grimace, and then notice how fast their heart has started to beat.
These are the people who have probably never felt like they were on the team of the living, like they were engaged with life — let alone engaged in life alongside others. These are the people who, for various reasons, went directly home every day after school — both middle and high — as soon as the bell rang and they could collect their things, and sat in front of the computer, and stayed sat there until bed because no one ever called for them and they never called for anybody. My guess is that for most of their lives they have felt something like homunculi; like they look human, and sound human, but that they don’t have the instinctual wetware the others do, the gyri and special ventricles that somehow guide real people to friends, to grabbing something to eat after class ends, to going to someone new’s house to hang out, and to every social activity of increasing complexity outward from there. Finding and having fun is something that real people can do so well and so reliably that the problem for them is usually figuring out how to not have too much of it. For these people, whom I speak to now, finding and having fun (outside the solipsism of a computer, or TV) has always been about as straightforward or easy as holding marbles steady on top of a glass plate.
And then these people get to college. And some of them dorm, and then some of them, the truly Dantean damned, commute. In either instance these people will be acutely, painfully aware of what is at stake: this is college. This is college. What a place it occupies in the national imagination, the artefacts we make. So many lines of dialogue and Instagram captions and paragraphs of descriptive prose written, so many photographs and videos, ad campaigns and movies and TV shows, jokes, cultural cliches, tweets upon memes upon tweets about what a strange exhilarating experience college is. You are drenched. Like someone who fell in a pool with all of their clothes on you are drenched with these notions, expectations as the first Fall nears: Get ready for the ride, keep your head. For most people this is a genuinely exciting proposition; for these people it may also be exciting, genuinely, but it will also be dread-inducing. Because pretty much all that these people can hear when they hear all of the usual talk about college is the one command that is surer than any to chill them:
You
Better
Have
Fun
God help you if you go the entire time without a single post-check conversation, a quiet moment with friends at 4AM, any good guitar nights, any good blackout nights; God fucking help you if there were never any hats. God help you because if there weren’t any hats then there will never be any hats — you can never get the hats now —because it’s over — in a few short months it’s over. What sinking horror has to grip these people as graduation nears and they realize that the chapter is reaching its close, that the story is moving along, again.
Keegan speaks to this in her essay:
There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out — that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.
And maybe this only twists the knife a little bit for the members of my special audience. Forget not adding enough to their c.v., forget not finding the perfect non-profit to work for— Are these really the things other people regret? they ask, has the gulf grown that wide at this point? I just wanted to feel like real person for the first time. I just wanted to feel like a real person for the first time. I just wanted to feel like a real person for the first time and instead everything was just as sad and barren as it has always been. And now things are supposed to get worse.
And these people probably entered college all too aware of the possibility that this grim scenario might arrive. (You better have fun.) The sad truth, though, is that it can all still slide right by you, regardless of how aware you are that it can all slide right by you. It can slide by for a lot of reasons, but my purpose here isn’t to explain how a person can go through college without doing much besides going to class and sitting in front of a computer when outside of class, or leading some other similarly blank kind of life, because it’s a truth that these people are out there and the ones who read this will recognize themselves.
And if you have recognized yourself at some point here then you need to listen to me now. You are right that it is over. It has gone. You have finished going to college and the sad misshapen story of its passing is yours and yours alone forever.
I am telling you that you have to, you must find some way to be empowered by your experience or you will be poisoned by it, okay? You will be poisoned by it and it will look like this.
You have to identify with this past of yours, and you have to find some way to make it make you stronger. If college was a quicksand pit of despair then you have to accept that and find some way to be empowered by it. This isn’t very specific advice, I understand. But hopefully this has been established at least: that the general project for you right now is one of cognitive restructuring. Part of that restructuring will be understanding Kegan’s message that it’s not too late — for anything. Human life isn’t 20% (the first bit) fun and then 80% (the rest of your life after age 23) drudgery. There is still time for everything.
This change will not happen quickly. Changing your actual beliefs about something takes consistent effort and attention. Graduation this coming Spring will, I’m afraid, probably be sad — maybe bonecrushingly sad — regardless of whatever reworking you do. But it will feel better as time goes on.
Outside of changing how you think about things that have already happened, it would behoove you to try to inoculate yourself with something like this idea expressed by Emerson towards the beginning of “Self-Reliance,” which is an essay entirely about what to do with the very next second of your life:
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Maybe you’ve never felt the feeling opposite of loneliness. Maybe you’ve always felt like an island. If that’s true I’m sorry. It can be deadening, and I hope that the details of this essay help you believe me when I say I know from experience that it can be deadening. I also need you to believe me when I say that your only true choice is and always will be to till that fucking soil. Happiness does not come from novel experiences or from youthful hedonism — happiness is something that is achieved, after a lot of work and a lot of time spent paying attention. I don’t think you are as nearly behind on the work as your peers as you think you are, and I wish you the best luck.
writes The Magpie, an eclectic newsletter published once a week predominating in social science and philosophy.
Photo of Marina Keegan by McKay Nield.
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This hits very close to home for me as someone who graduated this year feeling that, despite my efforts, I had failed in ascending to the sort of intellectual community I hungrily envisioned myself being a part of after high school. I wasn't as much of an outcast at my school as the hypothetical target of this essay, but I struggled mightily with loneliness and a sense of resentment that I'm still working out. For this and other reasons, graduation day was a largely emotionless occasion for me, though with an undercurrent of lament for all the opportunities that I missed and squandered.
All this said, I've come to develop a much more satisfying social life for myself in the months following my graduation, one that aligns much more closely with the grand vision I set out for myself four or five years ago. I don't think my belated, partial ascendance to this world can fully compensate for missing the undergraduate window for the realest sort of "the opposite of loneliness" - an opportunity that will necessarily never present itself again - but I can attest that it's possible to make oneself anew, or at least start that journey in earnest, after you walk off the stage on graduation day.
This is pretty great. I graduated college in 2010, but I have always hated my experience and going to college remains my life's greatest regret. It was fucking awful.
Super happy to see people finally acknowledge that those of us who grew up without friends didn't suddenly develop friendships in college. I spent so much of my time alone in school. And the people were awful!