Bags under the eyes as academic currency

In the first weeks of her studies, columnist Arendje noticed something: at university, everyone takes part in a kind of Olympic Games of exhaustion.

There is a competition taking place at university that no one ever signed up for, but which almost everyone takes part in. Not because we are so keen to win, but simply because we are afraid of losing.

This competition is not about the highest marks, the most talent or the greatest motivation. It is a kind of Olympic Games of exhaustion, busyness and mental overload, where the prizes are not medals, but bags under the eyes.

I first became truly aware of this during the first few weeks of my studies. We were studying in a group in the Education Center when someone said: “I only got six hours’ sleep last night.” Before anyone could respond, someone else said: “Six? I only got four. I still had to finish a deadline and I also went to the gym this morning.”

The rest of us laughed and the conversation continued. Suddenly, everyone was talking about how much sleep they had missed and why. I noticed how quickly the conversation turned into a kind of competition, in which the person who had had the shortest night seemed to earn almost admiration from the others. It became a kind of exhaustion poker: everyone laid their own overfull schedule on the table, waiting for someone else to come up with an even more extreme story. Before I knew it, I was doing the same. I caught myself almost proudly telling people how busy I had been, as if exhaustion were something to show off about, rather than a sign that something was wrong with your work-life balance.

The same thing happens with studying. You rarely hear someone say: “I did exactly enough today.” No, it is always one of two extremes. Either someone claims not to have done anything at all and then gets a 9.8 (lies), or someone has ‘literally studied for twelve hours non-stop’. The latter is also very unlikely to be true – depending on the amount of caffeine consumed.
There is also a separate category within this mutual competition: the stress contest. These conversations follow an almost fixed script:

“My week is really intense.”

“Oh, but mine is really tough.”

“I have three deadlines, two presentations and a group project.”

“Cute. On top of that, I also had work and a party, and my plant died.”

“My plant has been dead for three months and I only found out yesterday.”

Checkmate.

The irony is that no one wins this competition. There is no jury that awards a trophy at the end of the semester to whoever is the most chronically overworked. There is no round of applause in which you are congratulated for having exhausted yourself most effectively this year. What there is, however, is a collective tiredness that we all romanticise as if it were a positive character trait. As if being tired were a kind of academic currency with which you prove your right to exist.

But anyway, I have to wrap things up. Tomorrow I have an essay deadline that I have not done anything for yet, four meetings, I need to make a start on the thesis for one of my two degrees and I will probably have had far too little sleep. You might as well get that gold medal ready.