This idea first hit me after reading a friend’s piece about how we outsource so much of our lives that we start to lose ourselves. It got me thinking — what does that look like for us as college students? Walk across any campus quad today and you’ll see it: students with phones in hand, eyes darting between TikTok recaps, reviews and Instagram story “recommendations.” Where to eat, what class to take, whether a professor is “worth it” (via Rate My Professors) — everything from our coffee order to our careers seems to require validation from someone else before we make a move. Somehow, the modern college experience — once romanticized as a time to “find yourself” — has become an exercise in outsourcing our decisions to people we don’t even know. We justify our outsourcing as “crowdsourcing wisdom,” when in reality, we might (sadly) just be losing our ability to trust ourselves — and for that matter (and on a deeper note) our perception of who we really are.
College, once considered the start of our independence, seems no longer so. Leaving home, figuring out how to do your laundry, learning to navigate dining hall chaos and maybe even discovering your political or religious beliefs without mom, dad or your hometown best friend whispering in your ear — this was all part of a blurry unknown, one waiting to be experienced. Now? We open Instagram, we scroll through X, Reddit or TikTok. We give power to strangers’ opinions and rely on someone else’s experience to guide our own lives like a ready-made template. And, while there’s nothing inherently wrong with seeking advice — don’t get me wrong, nobody is suggesting that we stop considering others’ opinions altogether — when every decision we make must pass through the court of public opinion (our friends, followers and following), what happens to our own taste, our own instincts, our own goals and dreams? Ultimately, what we consider our “own” thoughts and beliefs merge, instead, into a plethora of everyone else’s thoughts and beliefs, except, in the end, our own.
The irony is that this outsourcing comes, for us college students, during the very years we’re supposed to be forming our identity. College is messy on purpose (spoiler: that’s okay!). You’re meant to pick the wrong class, regret the overpriced Cafe J latte, buy the textbook that you’ll never read — that’s how you learn what fits YOU, what goes with YOU, not what fits the TikTok algorithm. In this era of outsourcing, we overlook the fact that, many times, the “wrong” choice is precisely where all the good stories come from. The bad professor might somehow turn out to be the one who actually teaches you the most, the random coffee shop might be where you meet your new best friend and going to CJ’s and not Newf’s on a Friday might be the best night of your life. A major part of who we are is determined by what we do — and if what we do is always determined by others, then our identity is not one to call our own.
Put simply, when we prioritize others’ opinions over our own experience, we start living a secondhand life. So here’s a radical suggestion: close the app. Skip the “day in my life.” Take the class that your roommate hates if it sounds interesting to you. Eat what no one else picks in the dining hall (no, you don’t have to eat the Southwest salad because it's Thursday). Stop letting the loudest voices drown out your curiosity.
Because if we don’t? We risk graduating with someone else’s college experience, while our own gathers dust in the comment section.
