Horoskop forum

I’m a junior at a state university in Ohio, and I keep wondering: when did college stop being about learning and start feeling like a nonstop performance review? Between internships, side gigs, research labs, and building a “personal brand,” it feels as if we’re all auditioning for a life we’re not even sure we want. Is this pressure actually preparing us for the real world, or are we just burning out before we even graduate?

I’m 28 now, finished undergrad in Chicago and came back for grad school, so I’ve seen both sides. When I started, I bought into the Gary Vee grind mindset and thought sleep was optional. By senior year I was juggling two campus jobs and obsessing over LinkedIn while pretending I cared about Milton Friedman in econ seminars. What nobody tells you is that 60 percent of students report overwhelming anxiety, and it’s not because we’re lazy. It’s because we’re scared of falling behind some invisible scoreboard. I even looked at services such as assignmentpay.com searched for a help essay writer typed Write My Paper at 2 a.m., not because I couldn’t think, but because I was exhausted. The turning point was admitting I didn’t need to optimize every hour. College became tolerable once I stopped treating it as a startup and started treating it as four years to actually think.