Just as I was thinking, "The only thing worse than being as sick as I am right now is being as sick as I am right now in Cambridge," along came this little news service headline about how unhappy Harvard students, specifically undergraduates, are. Really, spectacularly unhappy, somebody's study now shows. Gee whiz, I wonder why that could be?
It's only what I've been saying practically since the day I got there and haven't shut up about since I left: the place isn't fit for human habitation. If the Pilgrims hadn't gotten lost on their way to Virginia, this whole country would have a different culture--a genuinely kinder, gentler culture--because those stiffnecked old Puritans would have thawed out, warmed up, relaxed, and made a few demands in the way of creature comforts plus good sex a way of life!
Instead, however, the Puritan sensibility thrives on in what they logically enough called New England, since they couldn't tell it from Olde in terms of climate and topography. They felt those hard, icy fingers of freezing wind clawing down their fussy little white collars, and felt right at home! And so it is that Rule #1 back there is "If you aren't suffering, you aren't doing it right."
For some reason, modern kids don't take too well to being frozen, housed in drafty/dilapidated old piles, overworked, underfed, underslept, underpartied, and downright neglected by the very people who are supposed to be "educating" them. The "four levels of supervision" that the College tells parents are there to "nurture and protect" are really there to police and protect property. In five years there, I saw countless suffering kids who needed nurture and protection--kids with eating disorders, mental illnesses, physical afflictions that they needed some savvy adult to catch on to, and to get them some help for. But any time I blew the whistle ("She looks like she's going to die!"), I was told to shut up, it wasn't my job, it wasn't their job either, and if we just waited long enough, the student would eventually drop out or take a year off or whatever it took to get fixed on his own.
That's how they do it back there: they just look away and wait for you to die or otherwise get out of their way. Like once when I spun out on sidewalk black ice, landed flat on my back, knocked the wind out of myself, and all the fine Cantabridgians who happened to be passing just stepped over me and/or gave me dirty looks for being in their way. That's pretty much what it's like, being an undergraduate at Harvard, is my guess.
Because either you Belong there, or you don't. There's no middle ground. By some eerie 7th sense, everybody knows if you're a "legacy," i.e., if your family has gone to Harvard for generations (40% of each class is admitted on this basis--and no other). If you're enough of a legacy--if you take yourself seriously as one, that is--you make sure everyone knows it right away. So the goat-farmer's kid from Alamogordo and the hockey player from the Yukon and all the others who gutted their way into Harvard, and probably are ten times smarter than the legacies, have this entitlement behavior to contend with on top of all the other miseries.
So that's why I always tell kids who ask me about Harvard to go to Yale. They're just as drunk, they're almost as cold, and they can be insufferable, yes, but somehow, they just seem happier.