I’ll start with honesty: I had no idea what to write this notebook about until eight hours after I meant to have finished it. I stood in the Poly office Monday night with Zack Shapiro ’10 and we commiserated about our lack of ideas. “I need a notebook topic … I need a notebook topic …” We left the office at an ungodly hour, our minds still barren, idealess landscapes. I thought sleeping would provide some inspiration, but no, I awoke in a foul mood, angry at the world and entirely uninterested in coming up with notebook topics.
It is at this point in my story, dear Poly readers, that I made a terrible decision. While this is certainly not the appropriate venue to detail what exactly that decision was, I regretted it and spent the rest of my day in self-loathing. I bemoaned my stupidity and my incompetence in every area of life, and considered dropping out of RPI and living as a hermit (Thoreau had the right idea). I moped around in general dejection, making myself and my friends miserable.
Unfortunately, today wasn’t much of a deviation from my everyday attitude as of late. The stress of exams, social drama, financial troubles, and strained Poly editors (I love you, Ryan) has really been catching up with me. I imagine I’m not the only one that’s become rather frazzled as the end of semester approaches; I’ve seen the symptoms in some of my friends, too.
On days like yesterday, I would really like to isolate myself from society. I wasn’t kidding about Thoreau: I find the idea of being a hermit very appealing. If you live away from all other people, you don’t have to deal with the pain of getting hurt or the guilt of hurting someone else. Your biggest concern is preventing yourself from getting scurvy.
Last night, a good friend of mine tried to prove me wrong by drawing a diagram of one’s happiness over time. The result of becoming a recluse at an early age was a sudden, deep drop in happiness level and early death. At the time, I laughed and protested and went back to looking for a nice place to build a cabin in the Catskills.
About an hour ago, I watched this man and other friends depart. As I gazed at their swishing coat tails and stumbling walks, the profound reality of his diagram hit me. As cliché as it sounds, my friends mean the world to me. Isolating myself would not solve my problems, because without these people, I’d go absolutely insane.
Despite the aforementioned stress I’ve been experiencing lately, I’ve had a great semester. And the highlights of this semester were not times I pulled away from society, they occurred in cars hurtling around snow-covered turns in the Adirondacks, in conference rooms at odd hours of the night, in the Union just killing time, in cafés drinking coffee, in casinos playing “Enchanted Unicorn,” and in diners at 4 am. None of these are options when you’re looking at a life of eating roots and writing about ponds and trees.
Maybe most people at RPI don’t want to go to the woods to live deliberately, but, as engineers, we’re infamous for undervaluing social interaction. At an institute where much of the student body is content to sit in dark rooms, wasting away in front of computer screens, I think my epiphany (as blatantly obvious as it is) bears repeating: hermitry isn’t worth it. Friends are more important than trees—even pixilated trees.
