Emily Hoeven | Blurred lives

What 'playing hard' and social media have in common

By Emily Hoeven 11/17/15 2:21am

It’s one of the most-heard phrases on any college campus, rotely recited to hopeful applicants when they ask what the college environment is really like. The double major you didn’t know you were choosing when you chose Penn. A phrase that over time becomes so familiar you stop questioning it: Work hard, play hard.

Yeah, we’ve all heard it before, but it’s a little more stringent at Penn. Here it’s not just about working hard and playing hard — it’s about working the hardest and playing the hardest, which often leads to getting hit the hardest. But this is not an addendum to the saying. It’s not listed as a side effect in super tiny script or by speaking at superhuman speed the way things are in medication commercials. No, it goes unmentioned, uncatalogued in the carefully cultivated Facebook albums, Instagram posts and casual conversations of the student body. We proudly uphold our dual designation as a prestigious Ivy League institution and the biggest party school in America without really thinking about what it means to bear those two weights.

Sometimes I consider all of the obligations and roles I need to keep balanced: good student, good friend (to both my friends at Penn and those from back home in a different time zone), good sister, good daughter. Not to mention a good coworker, a good member of different organizations and a good citizen. I need to take advantage of every opportunity offered by Penn and achieve the best grades I can while taking the most classes possible in order to get the most out of the massive sum of money my parents are investing in my education. I need to work out — to clear my head but also to remain in some proximity to fitness. I ought to explore Philadelphia, because it would be a shame to live here for four years and only be familiar with the same four blocks. I want to join clubs and organizations and rise to leadership positions within them so as to pursue my passions, try new things, gain experience and beef up my resume. It follows that I’m expected to land a plumb summer job or internship that will prepare me for some mystical future career. This means networking and applications.

And on top of all of this, the we-can-(and must)-do-it-all culture at Penn demands that I should partake in whatever “playing hard” means. Like making BYO one of the most-heard acronyms on Penn’s campus (which is saying a lot). And every weekend hearing stories about people blacking out, drinking themselves into incoherence, waking up and not remembering what happened the night before.

Playing hard is blurriness. Clouding of memory.

Maybe that’s what allows us to keep working hard. To keep doing all that we do, we have to forget that we did it — and that we’re going to have to keep on doing it. And thus we cope.

Playing hard uses the exact same tactic as social media. Social media has amnesia when it comes to hard times, let alone the hardest of times. It catalogs a shimmering collection of images claiming to portray what college and life are like: glitzy venues, parties with friends, beautiful clothes and scenery, expensive food photographed at artsy angles, impressive internships won. It seamlessly glosses over the moments before, in-between and after — in other words, what most of college is actually like.

Because after all, college is not just about balancing work and play. It’s about balancing work, play and everything else. We’re accustomed to living our lives in flashes with Instagram, photos of an instant in time, and Snapchat, images that are here one moment and gone the next. Social media gives us the ability to disregard, obscure, minimize and edit out the times we didn’t like so much. But more than anything else, it allows us to make it seem like everything we have comes easily to us. No one takes photos of the behind-the-scenes. Of the hard times. And as such, we don’t know how to deal with them. We aren’t equipped to handle them or even to admit that we go through them at all. We take pictures of our smiling faces without showing our shaking knees.

In our day and age, it’s not enough to live a successful life in real life — one must also live a successful virtual life. Might as well add that weight to the balance too.

EMILY HOEVEN is a College sophomore from Fremont, Calif., studying English.  Her email address is ehoeven@sas.upenn.edu. “Growing Pains” appears every other Tuesday.

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