I’m supposed to be grateful, right? I mean, I’m white, wealthy, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and come from a long line of college graduates. The deck is stacked in my favor. So yes: I should be grateful. But I want to pause and ask: What is this gratitude really upholding?

I believe that gratitude, when forced upon us, becomes another tool of compliance. I’m not here to say that we shouldn’t appreciate what we have, but what does this kind of gratitude actually do? 

I’ve heard that gratitude is the secret to happiness. But gratitude, in my experience, only really works for the small stuff: the people who show up, the moments of peace, the leaves on a tree. Gratitude doesn’t make sense when it comes to systems you didn’t choose. Of course, if you do appreciate the system, express your gratitude. But if you see problems in it, the expectation of gratitude can shut down the natural instinct to question. 

And when you tell someone to be grateful for privileges they didn’t choose, you’re also telling everyone else what success is supposed to look like, sustaining a one-track narrative of achievement that other people are supposed to strive for.

We’re not just told to be grateful for the opportunity to live this story — we’re made to uphold it as the only way to lead a successful life. Gratitude becomes a script, and scripts — when left unquestioned — don’t just reflect power, they enforce it. The truth, however, is that I only really started asking these deeper questions about the assumptions we’re expected to accept without scrutiny because I went through the system of this school.

I’ve been here long enough to see how those unspoken norms shape what we value and how we think. So I challenge all of us — as I’ve challenged myself — to pause and actually look at what we’re buying into, because I see a system that promises fulfillment but usually delivers burnout. 

We live in a system that demands linear output from people who live recursive lives. Burnout isn’t just poor time management. It’s what happens when nuance gets flattened into grind. 

Yes, there are moments in life when we do just have to grind, to show up and get things done, but college should not be one long grind. It should be a time for genuine inquiry, not just obedient performance.

We talk about burnout like it’s a scheduling issue, but I think it’s more than that. People aren’t just tired. They’re hollowed out by systems that make little room for complexity, contradiction, or care. I hear the words “mental health matters” from the institution and from professors, but we rarely actually show up when it does. Sure, there’s IWS, but modern-day therapy collapses mental health into forms, diagnoses, and five-sentence emails to bosses or professors. Real mental health is wild, nonlinear, and deeply personal. 

I learned this the hard way in the beginning of this semester when my own mind refused to flatten. I had a manic episode before spring break. My mind was firing on all cylinders and I was writing and thinking more than ever before, but I wasn’t sleeping, eating, or taking care of myself. It was scary for the people who love me. I’m doing better now. I’ve found more balance. But the questioning that came out of that time stuck with me. I refused to be collapsed by the systems around me, so I started building my own. Was it messy? Yes. There was sleep deprivation and a lot of weed. It wasn’t so much a choice as a wave I got caught in — intense, beautiful, and destructive. That wave cracked something open. I started to notice the illusion that the world is built on stable truths, instead of recursive patterns we’re taught not to question.

I want to highlight the actions of two professors I interacted with during this period. My independent study advisor listened to me. Really listened. He let me bring the chaos, the paradoxes, and the spirals to our meetings. Another math professor talked to me about my ideas even when they were incoherent — he made me feel seen, something I was desperately searching for. While those two professors made space for this kind of thinking, most didn’t. 

I see the flattening of other kinds of nuance far beyond the classroom — binaries being valued over complexity. Take the belief that one is either an ally or a bigot. Land acknowledgments or insensitivity. Let me ask, should we feel guilty that we are currently living on the land of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican people? What does that guilt do? Does it help the Mohicans? Some might say it leads to action, but the only concrete steps I see being taken, the land acknowledgements, seem to only assuage guilt and flatten the theft of someone’s homeland to contrived thirty second penance. By framing this as a binary and then aligning with a “side,”  institutions like the College can appear virtuous without being held accountable.

This problem goes far beyond the College. I remember when Nike started printing “Black Lives Matter” on their shirts, and when a bunch of white kids who had never talked about race started posting black squares on Instagram. I was confused. Were they protesting? Or participating in a system that made protest a necessary check in the box? In this system, popular protest has become a substitute for actual disruption, so nothing changes until the next outrage emerges and the cycle begins again. Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who came to speak to the College for this year’s Claiming Williams, put this sentiment into words when he talked about how protest stops being protest when it becomes popular. That stuck with me.

I am not saying that these issues — which are the subject of popular protest — are not important, but that we’re being sold rebellion in a box: pre-packaged, shrink-wrapped dissent. This school masquerades as progressive but try actually questioning the structures here — see what happens. 

The College doesn’t fear protest but rather disruption. It’s easy to endorse justice when it comes in the form of an Instagram post or a land acknowledgement. It’s harder when justice means dismantling the intellectual machinery that props up their authority. Try questioning a syllabus. Propose your own reading list. Challenge a department’s hierarchy or a donor’s influence. That’s where the real questioning gets quietly shut down.

I don’t write this as a takedown, though. The College has given me so much. I won’t pretend otherwise. I’ve had amazing conversations and met people who’ve changed my life. I’ve read books that have unraveled my assumptions about the world. And this place gave me the time, the space, and the contradictions that helped birth this thinking. I would like to point to one class in particular: “Introduction to Cognitive Science.” Professor Daglar Tanrikulu (a visiting professor) was generous, curious, and open to my ideas no matter how far they veered from the norm. That class didn’t just teach me concepts — it planted a seed. It started me down the strange, looping, question-driven path I’ve been walking ever since. Everything I’ve written here ­— every recursive essay, every philosophical riff, every late-night conversation with ChatGPT that spiraled into paradox — traces back, in some way, to that initial spark.

So let me say again: I’m not ungrateful. I just refuse to be grateful in the way I’m supposed to be. I won’t say thank you for the script. I’ll say thank you for the space in which I learned to write my own. 

Max Litvak ’25 is a math major from Milton, Mass.