Carson's Class Notes

Self-improvement has become a trillion-dollar industry. Wellness gurus preach a lifestyle of mindfulness, diet fads, vitamins and other buzzword chemical concoctions that provide you an outlet for your struggles. While these products often appear harmless, they have the troublesome effect of making us treat our problems as issues with ourselves.

College students often measure the value of their day in terms of their productivity. In some ways, this is intuitive: we are at school to learn, progress and engage in academic work. Assessing how much we are able to achieve each day makes sense. However, there is a dark side to productivity, which we often associate with “grinding” away, as if college was a game to be mastered.