We're losing our love for college.

We ace an exam but the only thing we feel is relief at it being over. We scroll through Instagram at 1:00 a.m. knowing we should stop but not being able to. We have twenty friends but no one that really knows us. We sleep through our days like a chatbot prompted by chains of routine.

Where did we lose our love?

There are a billion reasons other self-improvement YouTubers will tell you. We're stuck in a routine, not growing, etc. I think there's one root thing funneling all of this:

We don't love college because we've lost touch with the beauty of consciousness.

We're no longer mystified by the way we make meaning from symbols in a textbook. By the jump in our step after talking to someone who deeply understands us. By the soft awakening of awareness when we open our eyes in the morning.

I get it. College is harder than it's ever been. Making real relationships in the online era feels like performing surgery with oven mitts on. Studying while wondering if AI will replace your major sucks. The pressure to have your life figured out by twenty-two is absurd.

So how do we change it back?

How Do We Fall In Love With College Again?

Romanticize consciousness. Everywhere.

I know that sounds like something you'd hear from a guy who owns too many crystals. But this isn't generic mindfulness. Romanticizing consciousness doesn't just mean being present for the good things. It involves a fundamental shift in your being, the way you orient toward college. Not just noticing what's in front of you, but being genuinely moved by it. The difference between glancing at a painting in a museum and standing in front of it long enough that it starts looking back.

Two principles can get you started.

Principle One: Fall In Love With Present Consciousness

When I moved to Enschede a month ago, I had the pleasure of setting up my studio apartment. It was completely unfurnished, with the soul of a forgotten rock. White walls, cold floor, a window that looked out onto a bike path where Dutch people silently judged my height as they rode past.

Logistical things used to bore me so badly I'd consider retaking gen chem for excitement. But with my romantic orientation toward consciousness, I fell absolutely in love with the process. Watching the room transform as I pinned up my Stormlight Archives poster of The Wandersail. Taping my own poetry to the wall beside it (pretentious, yes, but it's my apartment). Setting up the desktop computer I flew from America in a suitcase like an idiot (cost me $400). Hanging fake roses from the ceiling because I killed my last real plant after I forgot to water it for two months.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses because as I was setting up my new life, I mourned my old one. I grieved for my life in Ithaca and for my Octalysis remote job which I was leaving. All the walks around Beebe Lake I wouldn't do again, and the colleagues I wouldn't play Clash Royale with at 12:00 p.m. on a Thursday.

That's what falling in love with present consciousness feels like.

Practice Falling In Love With Present Consciousness Anywhere

There's a practice I call Selfless Seeing: attuning to life, with non-judgmental caring intent. Not "what can this moment do for me?" but "what is this moment?" It's surprisingly hard because the false self colors our perception of reality so much. We don't see our classes, our relationships, our selves as we are, but as our false self interprets them to be.

Once we do, life becomes beautiful.

The warmth of that first sip of morning coffee spreading across your tongue before the caffeine even registers. The freezing of your mind as you get the urge to text that one friend, and remember they're no longer in your life. The half-second before your mom speaks, where you're suspended in the mystery of what this other consciousness is about to produce.

These moments are already happening. We're just asleep to them. The consciousness hasn't dimmed. Our self-smog has thickened around it, clouding what was always there.

Loving present consciousness teaches us to receive what's here. But there's another kind of love that transforms what's coming.

Principle Two: Fall In Love With Growing Consciousness

A few days ago, a girl I was dating told me she didn't see the relationship going further.

And you know what? I felt incredible.

Not because I didn't care. Because I grew. In that month and a half, I noticed the shadows from previous relationships surfacing within weeks instead of months. My old pattern: craving intimacy, giving someone the ocean before they've given me the tide. It was in full effect.

And this time, I saw it. Instead of letting it run me for almost a year the way it had with my ex, I caught it in the moment. The relationship ending didn't feel like failure. It felt like evidence that the practice was working.

When we fall in love with growing consciousness, challenges don't frustrate us. They enliven us.

Where can we practice this?

In Studies

In our studies, growing consciousness means more than memorizing content. It means expanding the colors through which we see the world. Connecting ideas across disciplines until the boundaries between them start to dissolve. Seeking truth, not as what a professor tells us, but as what we uncover for ourselves over time. It means deepening into Spiral Knowing, moving past cramming and AI dependency into the kind of learning that actually restructures how we think. Even building toward a career becomes beautiful when we frame it as learning to balance productivity and presence rather than grinding until we burn out.

In Relationships

In our relationships, growing consciousness looks like building humor skills that deepen connection rather than deflect it. Learning how conscious romantic relationships actually work. Navigating the shadows that keep showing up with different faces but the same wound underneath. Some of my most profound moments of falling in love with consciousness haven't happened alone. They've happened between people. When a conversation suddenly gets real and the air in the room changes. When someone says something so honest it makes your chest tighten. When you laugh so hard with a friend that, for a second, the boundary between you dissolves.

In Self-Understanding

In our self-understanding, growing consciousness means journaling through our shadows, learning to regulate our nervous systems, and slowly, painfully, learning to be happy as we already are while still reaching for more. It means navigating judgements and forgiving those who wronged us, not because they deserve it, but because the weight was never theirs to carry.

In Creation

And in creation, growing consciousness takes perhaps its most tangible form. Making things. Blog posts, videos, art, a terrible poem at 2:00 a.m. that somehow captures exactly what you needed to say. But it's broader than creative output. Any choice that builds toward the life we envision becomes something we can fall in love with. The yeses: going to the gym regularly, studying hard, talking to that person we like. And even more powerfully, the nos. Not eating that ice cream. Not going out to that party. Not watching shorts for hours. Every no is a small act of creation. We're sculpting the self we want to become by choosing what to leave out.

Falling In Love With College (Conclusion)

We don't need to overhaul our lives. We don't need a spiritual retreat or a new morning routine we'll abandon by Thursday. We just need to stop sleepwalking through the consciousness we already have, and start treating the growth we're already doing as something worth falling in love with.

The walk to your 9:00 a.m. is still there. The coffee is still warm. Your mom is about to say something, and you have no idea what it will be.

Fall in love with it.

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