experiments on a sample size of one by Ellie F. '28

I spend a lot of showers and walks and lectures thinking about how I make friends and why I use my phone so much and what makes me phase out during class. Then I proceed to not change anything about my life. And I wasted an hour of lecture. Does this sound familiar?

I think that since coming to college, nearly every facet of my life has improved considerably. I can’t tell how much that was driven by me, internally, and how much of it was my new environment, a result of being repotted when I was rootbound for so long. Either way, I picked up bad habits in freshman year that I still haven’t managed to shed, through a mix of complacency or inertia or some helpless sense of it is what it is. 

Now, I’m starting the second half of my life at MIT, and something (someone? someplace?) has lifted the mist out of my brain. I’ve hypothesized so long about what changes I’d make to my life if I could. Somewhere in there, I forgot that I just—can. I have will, and willpower, and I do hard things all the damn time. 

I’ve started carrying out what I call experiments, in a loving bastardization of the scientific method I learned in 5th Grade General Science. It was also that year, I think, when I read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (only it was a version for teenagers). I don’t remember much from that book–I learned what marijuana was (and that I shouldn’t use it), the definition of conscience (I pronounced it con-SCI-ence in my head for years), and the concept of “roping up”. I’m realizing now that, after years of playing telephone with my past self, this idea has probably warped in my mind from what it originally meant, but this is how I think about it: when setting goals for yourself, you should involve as many people as possible. If you can’t get anyone else to join you, just broadcast it to your friends. Be motivated from their support, or at least from not wanting to disappoint them. That’s what this blog is–a declaration of intent to whoever my audience is (hi) and something to hold me accountable. I hope it’s also entertaining.

Phoneless Friday

It’s Phoneless Friday! Are you celebrating? And I don’t want to hear some lame excuse like “it’s not Friday”–Phoneless Friday is a state of mind. 

I’m pretty sure there are very few people that are happy with their relationship with their phone. My years-deep rut tends to go like this: slide her out of my pocket, unlock, open Discord by instinct, no new messages because I did this a minute ago. And if I scroll over to Instagram may god help us all. 

The solution is far too obvious, right? Like, if you want to use your phone less, you can just not have your phone. Except, for some reason, this is not something I ever considered as a real possibility, and it seems to ring similarly for everyone I talk to about it. But, for me, a phone is essentially my MIT ID, credit card, how I communicate with people, and a camera. The rest I really don’t want to think about. The first two functions are trivially replaceable with their physical counterparts, and I can check my messages whenever I open my computer. I haven’t figured out a substitute for the camera yet, but I might buy one in the future. 

Anyways, I’m now unceremoniously stuffing my phone in the back of my shelf for at least a day a week. It’s working surprisingly well–I thought I’d be missing her like an earworm in my dopamine receptors, but it’s mostly silence. And it’s spilled over into  phoneful days too. I’ve been capitalizing on this by starting a competition with two of my friends with regards to screen time, and I do not plan to lose.

Getting a good grade in going to lecture

I have been a chronic lecture skipper since my second illness in freshman year. On my calendar, I would gray out the classes I didn’t go to, and it was looking like Boston winter out there. My justification for this, and I do think this is a valid reason, is that I just don’t learn well in lecture. My brain wants problems to chew on, and in lecture, it dreamwalks straight into hopelessly lost just a scant ten minutes in. So, in my four semesters here, my taste of lecture has mostly been reading the lecture notes days later, scrambling to find a foothold for that week’s pset.

I really didn’t think that would work this time around, with more units than ever, and I really didn’t care to find out, either. Enter this experiment: going to every lecture and recitation I can (still scheduled some overlaps… old habits die hard), sitting near the front, and actually answering questions. I don’t take notes. If I have my computer open in any capacity, my tabs will converge to crosswithfriends or the gnome game. And on my iPad, I use Procreate to do all my work. From experience, let me assure you that trying to take notes in an app meant for digital art results in some really great doodles and not many notes at all.

Now, going to lecture has started feeling like the professors are teaching straight to me. And I actually understand the algorithms we go over in class! Maybe I’ll use my tuition for something after all.

Microdosing Hiking

I work out every day now! And my chronic back pain is actually meaningfully getting better! This is not about that. This is about how I don’t have a car or the time to go hiking. 

When you think about it, hiking has two components. The first one is going up, and the second one is being in nature. You can’t argue with me because I’m the one writing this blog post, and also because I’m right. Anyway, if I can’t really hike I may as well get as close as I can. 

Going up is easy. As it happens, I live on the eighth floor, and the law has had the foresight to mandate a staircase in every building with more than one floor for me, specifically. So, whenever I’m alone (I am not going to make anyone else do this with me) and not in physical discomfort, I climb all eight floors up to my room. The nature part is trickier. I’ve been looking out the windows as I climb. There are trees there.

Open House

Making friends is so hard. I want to walk up to someone, mutually lay bare the most interesting dimensions of ourselves, and agree to meet up once a week ad infinitum. Maybe for boba. Instead, we have started asking about each other’s majors. Something has gone very wrong.

I haven’t figured out how to completely break out of the conversational flowchart that ends in following someone’s Instagram and never messaging them ever. Please email me at [email protected] if you’ve made progress on this. But a related, and maybe easier, problem is on how to maintain friendships with people you already like. Because if I reached out to and played Calendar Tetris against and spent meaningful time with everyone I’d like to see on a weekly basis, they’d be performing an autopsy on me.

However, I am not dead! And I’ve maybe developed a way of reaching out to people once and seeing them semi-regularly regardless. AND it doesn’t involve joining any clubs at all! That might be a new one for me. My roommate and I call it Open House, and it’s two hours of Please Come By and Hang Out (If You Can) each Friday. On Google Calendar, it takes the form of a recurring event with a long invitees list. In my room, it’s bread ends from Flour, juice, and a different subset of cool people every week. I’m afraid attendance might fizzle out with the onslaught of everything (I am gesturing extremely broadly), but the beauty of Open House is that it’s just as good with one person as with ten.