Wake up, go to class, eat, study, repeat. Our daily routines as Andover students are so tragically generic. As our 75-minute class periods merge into days and eventually into months, we become jaded by the seemingly never-ending cycle of school. Activities we once threw ourselves into now morph into lifeless repetition consisting of responsibilities and anxious struggles. Eventually, the only emotion remaining is stress. Soon after, we realize that the bar for achievement at Andover is impossibly high, and as self-doubt creeps in, we begin to spiral. But are these true existential crises, or just performative burnout?
“What’s the point of all this?” This question consistently appears in conversations with my friends. Andover’s campus is often clouded by a pressure to perform, to stand out among peers, in order to succeed both here and in the future. In our efforts to reach impossible standards, we fall into a habit of competing within our own friend groups: who’s in the highest math level or who participates the most in a discussion. It becomes a chase for validation that is nonexistent. And in the face of constant comparison and a burden to win, many of us struggle to realize how distinct each one of us is. Instead, we treat not fitting the mold of the ideal “Andover student” as a personal failure.
This pressure creates a harmful illusion of universality. We act like everyone is going through the same thing, like we’re all in crisis, but that’s just not true. Andover has cultivated a culture for students to glamorize unhealthy behaviors, normalizing an environment where students brag about four hours of sleep and skipping meals to cram for a test. It has become just another competition, one where students battle to be the most overworked, the most burned out.
This idolization of struggle can make it difficult to distinguish whether our actions are a result of stress or whether it is because of our desire to fit in with and relate to our peers. You bask in the spotlight after sharing how you pulled yet another all-nighter, the bags under your eyes dissipating ever so slightly as you get showered in concern. After tests, you rush to your friends to rant about how awfully you did, reveling in sympathy.
We never stop to consider if we actually need to stay up five extra hours just to finish two more assignments. Never question whether a low six was actually worth crying over. Manufacturing our problems for scraps of attention, we form entire relationships through conversations filled with complaints. Thinking these connections will fizzle out if we don’t have this one common ground, we push ourselves to maintain our unsustainable lifestyles.
How can we know if someone is truly in a crisis if everyone around us is constantly announcing their exhaustion and stress for approval? When pain is performative, real pain becomes impossible to spot. We risk invalidating those whose experiences do not fit the exaggerated version of struggle we see so often on campus. The only hardships we want to have are ones we can control, ones that don’t impact our academics. It’s a twisted situation: we compete over who’s suffering the most until it comes to tangible, lasting things. After exams, discussing our performance with our peers, we let out sighs of relief after hearing someone did worse than us. Though we say we failed and that we probably did worse than they did, we shudder at the thought of receiving anything short of perfection.
While performative pain is often self-inflicted, it doesn’t make it any less harmful. When students exaggerate their stress to fit into Andover’s culture of overachievement, they hurt not just themselves but also warp the collective understanding of what true crisis looks like. But this also doesn’t mean real pain doesn’t exist in our campus. In fact, the louder performative struggles become, the more invisible the genuine ones become. As our campus normalizes constant exhaustion, we risk drowning out students who are silently burning out.
We need to be more honest with ourselves, because not every challenge needs a trophy. Sometimes, it’s ok to finish your work at three am without telling anyone. And by creating a space for quieter forms of vulnerability, we dislodge our habit of constantly broadcasting our struggles. Especially at a place like Andover, it is necessary for students to be careful not to confuse performance for pain.
