📖Depression Is Living A Bad College Freshman Story
What if depression is simply not living a story we're proud of?
These are the words which hit me like a tsunami the first time I read Donald Miller's book, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years. I was a college freshman at Cornell University and thought I was living a great story. YouTube content creation and blog post writing. Financial freedom. Travelling the world.
Yet, I awoke many days, asking myself what the meaning was all for while grinding beans for morning coffee.
It took me until my second read my sophomore year to realize the gap. I was a writer channeling words. But I wasn't channeling life. I weaved stories into beautiful silk quilts on my blog, but left the knitting of my physical journey on the sidelines. Worse yet, I weaved my stories alone, and a solitary story is no story at all.
So, I began to live my life more like a story.
I became a cliche romantic with my first girlfriend. I turned my back into crushed ramen noodles in the 90 Miler Adirondack Canoe race with my dad. I started Conscious College, a company devoted to helping college freshmen use journaling to grow their emotional intelligence, self-understanding, and purpose.
The more I live life like a story, the more I notice how many students aren't living theirs. It makes me sad. I watch students walk to class, backpacks heavy with books and laptops, but most of all, the crushing weight of melancholic hope that something, someday, will change.
To be clear, I don't think all depression is caused by simply not living a story we're proud of. That's too black and white. Clinical depression has neurochemical, genetic, and environmental roots that no amount of storytelling can override on its own.
But I've come to believe from experience and books like Lost Connections by Johann Hari, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that a lot of what we experience as depression stems in part from this. Hari calls it disconnection from meaningful work, from other people, from values. Frankl calls it the existential vacuum. Csikszentmihalyi calls it psychic entropy. They're all circling the same campfire: when we stop participating in life and start spectating it, something inside begins to wilt like a houseplant shoved in a closet.
That's why I returned to Miller's book for a third pass, hoping to find answers in how my fellow students could turn their lives into stories worth telling. Here's what I found.
Every Great Story Starts With A Character...
That's you. The student reading this article. Hi!
As a person (theoretically) you're a mix of physical traits, values, relationships, ambitions and more. A lot of this stuff is great. If you're like most of us, you're seeking something more, something deeper, something you can't quite explain. When I first came to college, I was an insecure, exercise obsessed, lonely 18 year old.
But if you're similar to me back then, you don't want to change. Your habits fit like a broken-in pair of sneakers. Uncomfortable to everyone else, molded perfectly to you. Change takes effort and effort is, well, effortful.
And here's where it gets fascinating: the story we should go on depends on where we are in our development. Some students need a story about learning to lean on grades less. Others need a story about finding self-improvement. And yet another student's story is learning how to love. We don't all need the same quest, even if we're sitting in the same lecture hall. (To learn more about the story right for your character, check out my article on college freshman ego development.)
Regardless of your development, in most stories, something needs to get the character going. Think Bilbo getting invited to join a band of dwarves and a wizard in The Hobbit. That's where our story begins.
The Character Is Forced To Start A Story Through An Inciting Incident
The inciting incident is the event, non-event, or other trigger which pushes the character onto the story's journey.
Life isn't as clean as a storybook. We go through many inciting incidents, each with their own beautiful stories throughout the chapters and seasons of our lives. For me, I experienced a series of three in succession which made me realize something needed to change. Firstly, I lost touch with my freshmen friend group. Secondly, I was abandoned by five members of my YouTube accountability group after one of them accused me of copying their content (it's complicated). I still remember the silence of the group chat afterward. Five people, gone. The notification sound just stopped (apart from them telling me they were leaving of course). And thirdly, I met Chris, who is to this day one of my closest and most spiritual friends.
These inciting incidents kickstarted my journey. Towards what? I didn't exactly know yet.
All I knew was that the greater the ambition, the greater the story.
The best stories, the ones that make us weep every time we watch them, usually involve goals which are larger than the hero themselves. Goals that connect entire webs of students, communities, and even the world. This is what I meant by I was only channeling words for my own story, not others.
Congratulations, this article can be your inciting incident. Could be a little more glamorous but we can't all have a band of dwarves and a wizard show up at our doorstep.
It's totally fine if you don't want to start with something so grandiose. You might not know your goal, or you might to some degree but it hasn't evolved. The goal itself matters less than having a goal, even if that goal is finding a goal. It could be asking that cute boy or girl on a date. It could be pursuing a meaningful career path. It could be trying out for that club you've walked past eleven times pretending to check your phone.
Whatever you choose, it's unavoidable that story will have one thing.
That Story Will Have Obstacles
Countless obstacles showed up throughout my story. My girlfriend almost broke up with me after she told me I was too productivity oriented and didn't love her enough (she was right). I struggled to get a business to work helping students learn notetaking and studying skills using Obsidian. I lost passion for my schoolwork as other stories began to take the cake.
Each time I solved an obstacle, it seemed another just popped up. Whack-a-mole with a philosophy degree. It brought me to the brink of insanity, until I learned another storytelling principle from the book: the obstacles are the story.
Have you ever skipped to the end of a romance novel (not that I read romance novels of course, cough cough)? Was it satisfying? Unless you experienced a sex scene which trumps all of Pornhub, probably not. You didn't experience the setbacks, the near-misses, the journey which led to the end. And so, it didn't hit.
Life works the same way. We complain, we get annoyed, we dodge obstacles without realizing it's the obstacles themselves that make the story.
What makes an obstacle? On the surface, an obstacle is simply that which blocks a character from their goal. It could be a professor, an exam, a particularly soul-crushing internship application portal that requires you to re-enter your entire resume after uploading your resume.
But here's the deeper cut most of us avoid: the real obstacle is usually internal.
We create obstacles from our relationship to them. This doesn't mean external challenges don't matter, they obviously do. Every external challenge passes through the stained glass of our own patterns. What comes out the other side is colored by avoidance, self-deception, and attachment, often unrecognizably so. The student who can't start their essay isn't blocked by the essay. They're blocked by the fear of writing something that doesn't match the image they hold of themselves. The student who won't ask for help isn't stopped by the professor's office hours. They're stopped by the belief that needing help means they're failing.
The more we mature, the more we learn we are the obstacle. That sounds deflating, but it's actually the most liberating thing I've discovered in college. Because we are included in every experience we have, we can grow ourselves regardless of how tough the external situation gets. The obstacle is portable; you can't outrun the clouds if they're forming inside your chest. But that makes the solution portable too.
This doesn't mean we deserve every obstacle. It doesn't mean it will always feel fair. But whatever comes across as we continue our story is an opportunity for growth, for reflection. Especially when those obstacles carry the next storytelling principle.
Great Stories Have Obstacles With Stakes
You can have a great character, a great goal, and a great obstacle. Think a Gandhi persona wanting to solve world hunger by creating 10,000 new soup kitchens. But if they simply use their trillion dollar trust fund they inherited from their mother, it's not a very good story. No tension, no sacrifice.
Great obstacles are connected with great stakes. Let me show you what I mean from my own life.
I almost died when two naive French tourists led my friend Fionn and I to come within 15 feet of a grizzly bear in Glacier National Park; they thought we would want to see it up close. To stay with my first girlfriend, I needed to choose between my old productivity-obsessed identity and one that values relationships, presence, and love. Then there's the time I had to lead a consultancy project with a pharmaceutical executive and their data science team right after getting broken up with by my ex. And of course, can't forget when I had to choose between staying with or breaking off one of my closest friendships because of fundamental value differences.
As you can see, stakes come in many shapes and sizes.
Stakes can be physical (loss of life or bodily safety), psychological (loss of identity or mental health), professional (damage to career prospects), and relational (damage to or loss of relationships). Most of our obstacles carry at least one. The ones that transform us carry several at once.
Here's the uncomfortable question: what are the stakes in your current story? If the highest stakes you face this semester are what letter grade you'll get on your next exam, that might explain why life feels like it's being lived in grayscale. Not because grades don't matter, but because a story where the only thing at risk is a number on a transcript doesn't ask much of you as a human being. It doesn't touch your identity. It doesn't test your relationships. It doesn't make you confront who you actually are when things get hard.
That doesn't mean you should start manufacturing dangerous situations. But it might mean stepping into something that costs you more than a few study hours. Something where your sense of self is actually on the line.
Whatever the obstacles and their stakes, they must prompt the character to do the next storytelling element.
Great Stories Create Transformation
Why do we like movies so much? No, really. Movies have a unique pull on us compared to any other form of story.
Just over the last few weeks I've watched the Before trilogy, Arrival, Cloud Atlas, and The Secret Life of Chuck. I think a large part of what draws us to film is that movies are distilled transformation vessels. In the Before Trilogy alone, Jesse transforms from an insecure jaded boy to a hopeful longing romantic between the first and second films. Two hours and you've witnessed years of becoming.
In comparison, most of our lives are mundane. Not boring, but mundane.
We wake up, spend an unreasonably long amount of time in the shower (I'm talking to you, roommate), get some coffee, go to class, study, and repeat. There's not much visible transformation happening. But if you sliced up all that happened in your day into single 10 second moments of change, now we have a movie. And this transformation is what we long for. It's what Csikszentmihalyi describes as the difference between entropy and flow: one scatters your attention across a gray landscape, the other concentrates it into something that feels like living.
What makes this transformation even more powerful on screen is it's all action oriented. Unless there are voiceovers, movies rely on characters' actions to progress the story. There's movement, consequence, decision. Compare that to our real lives where we spend 173% of the day in our heads, rehearsing conversations we'll never have and replaying ones that already happened.
When I first realized this principle of transformation, I asked myself one question: How can I live my life more like a movie?
I began doing daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly journaling. Each of these became a ritual of reflection and goal setting. What would the next month's major goals be? What would the story of the month look like? And most importantly, how could I embody that in action rather than just thinking about it? I stopped treating journaling as a record of what happened and started treating it as a screenplay for what could happen next.
Slowly, my life became more transformational. I became spiritual. I started creating content out of passion mixed with practicality rather than just practicality. I did psychedelics (that was a trip, literally).
But transformation doesn't have to look that dramatic. I've watched students transform by switching from eating lunch alone to eating with someone new once a week. By starting a journal. By telling a friend what they're actually struggling with instead of performing the "I'm fine" ritual we've all perfected. Small actions, repeated. That's the raw material of a story worth living.
The Ultimate Story
So what is the ultimate story?
It's not one with the biggest obstacles or highest stakes. It's one where you grow toward something larger than yourself, something that connects you to others and asks you to become more conscious, more loving, and more honest along the way. This is what I call the Conscious College Journey: the gradual shift from living for the false self (grades, status, approval) toward something truer.
Every principle in this article feeds into that journey. The character who takes ownership of their development. The inciting incident that wakes them up. The obstacles, external and internal, that sculpt them. The stakes that make it real. And the transformation that makes it meaningful.
Here are two questions worth sitting with after reading this:
- What story am I currently living, and is it one I'm proud of?
- What's stopping me from starting a new one?
I'm still living stories. They never end. Right now, mine involves a potential move to the Netherlands, applying for a master's program in Educational Science & Technology. My obstacles are finances and a difficult work climate. The stakes are changing from my old Cornell identity (psychological), shifting careers (professional), and the loneliness that comes with starting over somewhere new (relational).
But you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. I feel alive.
Because eventually, you realize the journey is the destination. And then you realize that sounds like a bumper sticker. And then you realize the best truths usually do.