Conforming to Complaints

I wake up around 9:50 a.m. and hop in the shower to enjoy my triple sleep-in. As I munch on my bowl of Lucky Charms in D-Hall, a dorm-mate collapses into a chair with a sigh, tossing his bag to the ground.“Damn, I got four hours of sleep last night. Chem lab, religion paper, five class day. The struggle,” he says, his tone thick with exaggerated pain.“I got to bed at four, man, I’ve been procrastinating on my 333 and I have math and bio tests today,” chimes in another student with bags under his eyes.There is an obvious pressure to complain at Exeter, which accompanies the large workload thrown upon us. Uppers and seniors constantly hold their loads above the heads of preps and lowers, insinuating that they have it so much harder than the underclassmen do. For example, a senior recently mentioned off-hand that the 333 he wrote last year was equivalent to “ten times” a prep’s religion paper.As students at Exeter, we occasionally find ourselves nights in which we were well prepared and finished homework early. The next morning, when we casually bring up the amount of sleep or the light load, we are greeted by groans or snide remarks about our lack of initiative by the people who seem to have tests and papers due every day. The school seems to breed a mindset where procrastination and complaining are commonplace, and there is an unseen pressure to feel stress. Little sleep and oppressive amounts of homework are seen as the pure “Exeter experience” and are considered a necessary facet of life at the school. But how much does the school’s generation of strenuous workloads support complaining, and how much are people just doing it out of necessity or peer pressure?This pressure to complain does not simply revolve around amount of sleep and workload, however. D-Hall, for example. If one were to ask a group of students at Exeter, D-Hall would be torn to shreds and reduced to mystery meat and egg product. But in reality, the stigma that the dining halls on campus have terrible food is both an injustice to the people who work hard to give us three meals a day and simply another outlet for the victim complexes that so many jaded students develop at Exeter. Let’s be honest, who does not have at least a few favorite dishes at D-Hall? Pulled Pork? Roast Beef au Jus? Pizza on Saturdays and omelets on Sundays? Exeter Bars and Soft Serve?These are just a few examples, all of which seemingly disappear any time a student complains about D-Hall. And of course, following the peer pressure of complaining at Exeter, students agree and choose to forgo any positive feelings, associating the positives of good meals, large quantities of sleep, or light workloads with the negative connotation of a lack of conformity.We firmly believe that Exeter should not be an institution that breeds people to fear the positives and complain about the negative aspects of their lives. If you have a triple sleep-in, maybe don’t be that guy who brags about it at D-Hall, but certainly, please, for the emotional stability of the student body, don’t feel bad about the good parts of life that Exeter has to offer.