Productivity and Pandemic: Reflections from a Wash U Senior

Warm afternoons sitting on Mudd Field, picnicking on Art Hill or strolling down the Loop. Readings that didn’t really matter anymore, lazy mornings with my roommates, and final adventures exploring the parts of St. Louis that our too-busy schedules had not allowed for up to this point. This is how I had imagined the final six weeks of my senior year: a utopic, golden haze of sunshine, friendship, nostalgia, and little responsibility. With 3.75 years of grinding and a completed senior honors thesis behind me, spring break was to mark a transition into my reward: the final 42 days of the supposed best time of my life. 

Like many other members of the class of 2020, that expectation has crumbled down into a new reality as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, I am back home in the same bedroom I had in high school, motivating myself through a few hours of Zoom classes each week. My friendships have turned long-distance overnight, and my access to sunshine is restricted to the very intentional daily walks I take in an effort to otherwise self-isolate as much as possible. I know that in so many ways I am extremely lucky: I have a safe home to come back to, parents who can work remotely, health insurance, and few responsibilities outside of keeping myself and my loved ones safe. For these things, and so much more, I am grateful. And with that acknowledged, I, like so many seniors, still can’t help but feel like something special was stolen by this pandemic. Not just time, but the time that was to make all of the previous late nights and sacrifices “worth it.”

Now that we are severed from the material structures of Wash U that allowed for academic success, and the social lives built around them, what lessons can we learn about our values moving forward? 

My last six weeks of college were going to be about the relationships I had at this institution, not my classwork or resume. But now that those relationships have been scattered across the country, what I am left with is a lot of empty time to sit with these feelings of loss and reflect on this attitude. When I think about why the cancellation of these weeks feels so painful, I realize that I had rationalized my moments of being overworked knowing that this reprieve was in sight. For me, sacrificing nights with friends to work on my senior thesis was made more understandable knowing I had this transition time ahead. Others justified cancelled plans to study for the MCAT or LSAT in the same way. Even more generally, a celebratory finish would make four years of hard work truly worth it.  

None of us did anything wrong—naturally there are busier times in life when a deadline is on the horizon. It’s not our fault that we didn’t predict a global pandemic. And when I look back, of course I am proud of the things I have accomplished through hard work and the ways I have grown as a student and leader. But why does it feel like we put all of our proverbial eggs in the basket of six weeks? What does this say about myself, my relationship to work, and school, and people? If I had known, would I have done things differently? 

As I look back on my four years at Wash U, I realize that these questions are not unique to the current moment, but are ones I have dealt with throughout my entire college experience. From the first days of Bear Beginnings, we are warned to find a balance between the academic expectations of our institution, our burgeoning social lives, and our personal health. But now that we are severed from the material structures of Wash U that allowed for academic success, and the social lives built around them, what lessons can we learn about our values moving forward? 

Ironically, Wash U has both pushed me the farthest I have ever been pushed, while also being the place I have started to challenge these ideals. 

Seniors in college are not the only ones reckoning with similar questions. The COVID-19 crisis and the adaptation to stay-at-home orders for those privileged enough to do so have brought reconciliation with new standards of productivity, ideas of being a good worker, and self-care. On the one hand, some have promoted the message of “making the most of quarantine.” From social media influencers to employers to some annoying friends on Facebook there have been declarations of taking advantage of “all of this free time” to read the book that has been lying on your bedside table, learn to sew, finally take up yoga, or learn how to make sourdough bread—all, of course, while maintaining a full work or academic schedule from the supposed comfort of your own home. 

But there has been pushback to this narrative as well. Across social media, people have recognized the flawed logic behind such statements. Apparently, even in times of global crisis and peril, we must create, produce, or accomplish in order to be deemed “good” and “worthy.” This attitude assumes an idealistic quarantine environment void of shared space with children, the need to take care of immunocompromised relatives, or simply being anxious as the world experiences unprecedented changes. Acknowledging these facts, mental health experts have reminded us, as put in a recent headline from the Washington Post, “It’s Okay to Not be Productive During a Pandemic.” Many Wash U professors have also been equally kind and supportive, knowing that their students do not have the capacity to engage with their syllabi in the same ways from home. Beyond the personal, there are also political implications for rejecting the need to pretend that all is normal. Acknowledging that it is okay to work less and to slow down can be a small form of resistance to a neoliberal logic always demanding that we not only push ourselves as far as we can go, but that we feel guilty when we don’t. 

But, as I look back at my years at Wash U, I wonder why it has taken a pandemic for this conversation to come to the forefront. Over-extended schedules are regularly admired, encouraged, and glorified at the expense of mental health, a decent sleep routine, or the joys of simple leisure time. At this school, students schedule in hour-long blocks to catch up with a friend, have their laptops constantly open during coffee breaks, and casually refer to the fact that they need to grind over the weekend—a word literally referring to the physical maneuvering of machine parts, not of human beings. I have done all of these things, aware of how much I have internalized discourses of worth and production. Ironically, Wash U has both pushed me the farthest that I have ever been pushed, while also being the place I have started to challenge these ideals. 

Perhaps we can, to some degree, replace grinding with caring, producing with restoring, achieving with enjoying.

The best decision I made at Wash U was to use my nine yearly free therapy appointment sessions at SHS. In that space, I began a process of slowly un-learning perfectionism and the need to go, go, go that I share with many of my peers. I have learned about self-compassion, mindfulness, and separating my worth from my work. Needless to say, it has been a bigger source of learning than any seminar or lecture. Now, it feels that I am being asked to put all of that learning to the test in this strange end of a senior year, as we have all been forced to slow down in ways we did not choose.

For many seniors, graduation would have been a day to celebrate our accomplishments with family and friends: a time to acknowledge our sacrifices, challenges overcome, long nights, and the amazing achievements that came as a result. I still want to celebrate those things, and hope that my class can find ways to do so despite being unable to come together on May 15th. But I also want to celebrate what I am continuing to learn about caring for myself. I hope that we can all embrace this weird, disruptive time as an opportunity not to grind, but to re-evaluate what we have called normal for so long. Now that we can’t have these six weeks back, how will we treat our relationship to time and people in the future? Perhaps we can, to some degree, replace grinding with caring, producing with restoring, achieving with enjoying. Maybe, when the moment comes for Wash U students to come back to campus, those returning can take some of the “pause” forced on us by self-isolation into the vibrant relationships and activities awaiting them. Perhaps we can all find a bit of these lost six weeks in the every day.