By Nathaniel Nerone
Much to the chagrin of my editors-in-chief, I am sure, this is not the article I promised for this edition of The Grizzly. My initial intent was to comment on the nuances of the dynamic between certain offices on campus and the students they serve. I was going to unpack a disconnect I felt I’d identified and heard echoed by my fellow students that I believed resulted in Ursinus students feeling a lack of autonomy and adulthood, which I felt then turned into apathy and lack of engagement in our community. I was going to compress this big, sprawling issue into a neat little package and start pointing fingers.
Then, I thought about it more carefully. It occurred to me that it’s utterly absurd to try to blame the administration for student disengagement and apathy, especially when it’s a pattern I’ve noticed before in another context.
It sucks to be a college student right now. My friends and I talk about how we’re never going to own houses, how all of our careers are uncertain and increasingly undefined in the face of AI, how we doomscroll constantly even though it makes us feel like crap. I wake up every morning afraid that someone I love — a family member, a friend, any one of my immigrant or first-generation allies — might be snapped up, or worse, by ICE. Our collective consciousness is, so far as I’ve seen, almost consumed by the pitch-dark, oily cloud of, “Where the hell do I go from here?” And yet, so many of our peers, in casual conversation or in their dating app profiles, describe themselves as “apolitical.”
Well, I don’t think there’s any such thing.
Seriously, I don’t. I’m not saying that I think it’s selfish to be apolitical, and I’m not trying to make an argument where “no minority person can be apolitical, because they’re politicized.” I don’t think any person is truly apolitical. Consider what you see when you doomscroll on social media. What creators do you tend to see? What traits do they have in common — race, class, gender? Who sponsors them? A sponsored creator who does maximalist “fridge restocks” might have no political intent whatsoever — they might be legitimately just having fun and taking sponsorships to support themselves. But I see their videos, and I am mesmerized. My fridge doesn’t look like that. Should it? Should I be investing in dozens of plastic tchotchkes to dress up the bento boxes I also need to buy, so I can make my nonexistent meal prep whimsical and Y2Kcore? When I — this fantasy version of me — buys these plastic tchotchkes and these bento boxes, I am playing into consumerism and into the idea that my day-to-day life ought to be, in some way, aesthetically pleasing. Even if I legitimately enjoy seeing my tchotchkes, that enjoyment and what I think is beautiful is inevitably influenced by the culture around me, like the fridge restock influencer I run across sometimes, or by advertisers trying to mold my views to best suit their bottom line. The imaginary, stunning, satisfying bento boxes in my fridge are shaped by the powerful corporations who sponsor creators on my Instagram timeline. This kind of pattern exists, too, in my feelings towards what majors I picked. (Creative writing is being taken over by LLMs. So is Math. AI corporations charge forward regardless.) The books I read are influenced by what publishers think is viable in today’s market — what will go viral on TikTok and Instagram. Is that not political?
Obviously, it’s not viable for each of us to trudge through life considering every possible influence over our every action, then every possible effect our actions could have, and I don’t think that’s even something to aspire to. “Analysis paralysis” is inaction, no more noble than any other kind of inaction, and, besides, I’m too busy to cry in the C-Store because I have to look up whether every company represented aligns with my political views. (Spoiler: largely, they do not.) But it would be just as unrealistic — it would go against reality — for me to cast all conscious political thought out of my mind and say that that makes me “apolitical,” not when the amount of money I made at my first job was influenced by my community’s minimum wage laws. I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes catch myself acting in ways that demonstrate unconscious bias, even against communities that I’m a part of. These politically-influenced choices don’t go away because I stop interrogating them.
Being disengaged isn’t the default — it’s a choice, and it’s one we all make at times, but we can’t convince ourselves that disengagement from politics is the absence of politics in our day-to-day lives. I can’t hope to explain why Gen Zers are the way we are — are we overwhelmed? Is it connected with the literacy crisis? Does our social isolation harm our ability to process big, political issues? I don’t know; I wouldn’t even begin to claim to know. But I do know that the first step isn’t to blame others. It’s to ask what we can do differently.
