The question in the headline is one I've sat with more times than I want to admit. You're in a lecture hall surrounded by hundreds of people and still feel like you're holding the whole thing alone. You scroll through campus events and see everyone having a better time than you. And you wonder if something is broken in you or if the system just never built the wiring for this to feel normal. Two students dig into exactly that in this week's Voices of Student Success episode, looking at how social media, post-pandemic campus shifts, and the way institutions handle belonging are quietly rewriting what connection is supposed to look like. It connects to something bigger that What's Driving the Student Mental Health Crisis? raises too, because loneliness doesn't live in a vacuum. It's load-bearing. It's structural. And pretending it's just a personal mindset problem is the easiest way for universities to avoid the actual work.
What struck me most is the part about institutions falling behind. Not failing, falling behind. There's a difference. A school can still technically exist, still have clubs and study lounges and advising appointments, and still miss the fact that students are showing up to those things already exhausted and already halfway checked out emotionally. I've been to club meetings where everyone was friendly but nobody really knew each other yet. I've sat in the library for two hours telling myself that proximity to other people counts as socializing. It doesn't. The real problem is that belonging isn't a program you can launch in September and call it done. It's something you build through repeated, low-stakes interaction over months. Small things. Someone remembering your name at the dining hall. A group chat that's actually fun to be in. A professor who asks how your week is going and means it. Those moments are harder to fund than a new wellness center, but they're what actually hold people here.
I also think the social media piece gets undersold. We joke about doomscrolling, but there's a real feedback loop happening. You see curated versions of campus life, assume everyone else has it figured out, and then perform your own version of "figured out" so it looks good on your story. Nobody posts about the night they ate ramen alone and questioned every decision that led them to Pullman. But everybody's doing it. The isolation isn't dramatic. It's quiet. It's the distance between who you are at 2 AM and who you're expected to be by noon.
So what actually helps? Honestly, I think it's the boring stuff. Showing up consistently. Sitting with people even when the conversation is small. Volunteering for something not because it looks good but because it puts you in a room with people who care about the same thing. That's not a fix. It's a practice. And it's worth watching whether campuses are willing to invest in the infrastructure for that kind of slow, unglamorous connection, or if they'll keep building bigger buildings and calling it progress.
