Students fear irrelevance, not failure

I remember there was a time when students feared report cards. Even now, I cannot forget how my mother used to scold me for not getting an “O” (outstanding) in maths. Now we fear becoming “inactive” on LinkedIn for more than three days, and being in a creative slump.

Somewhere between attendance shortages, internship applications, AI tools and overpriced cold coffee, being a student has quietly transformed into being a full-time brand manager for ourselves. You can see it everywhere on campuses now. A student walks into a café with a laptop, orders one cappuccino, and suddenly the table becomes a start-up headquarters. Someone is editing a podcast. Someone is preparing for CAT while simultaneously designing a pitch deck. Someone else is saying words such as “scaling,” “networking”, and “building in stealth mode”, while still asking their room mate for lab record observations. Even engineering colleges do not feel like engineering colleges any more. They feel like content studios with WiFi problems.

Half the students are building portfolios. The other half are building “personal brands”. Nobody knows what is happening in class, but everybody somehow knows how to optimise a LinkedIn headline. And honestly, the pressure is strange because it is no longer about being good. It is about being visible. Every achievement now comes with an unspoken second task: post about it. Won a competition? Post it. Attended a webinar? Post it. Drank coffee with a founder for 17 minutes? Post it too! “Had an insightful discussion regarding innovation and growth.” “#startup #coffechat”

Sometimes it feels like we are all living two lives simultaneously, one real and one formatted for social media. You cannot simply draw any more. You need to “build an art page”. You cannot sing because you enjoy singing. You must consider “content consistency”.

God forbid you casually enjoy photography without turning it into a cinematic reel with indie music and subtitles in lowercase. And then comes artificial intelligence. Earlier, students feared not studying enough. Now they fear being replaceable. When an AI tool can write essays, summarise lectures, generate code, make presentations, and even draft emotional emails better than some humans, an uncomfortable question begins floating silently inside everyone’s head: “What exactly makes me valuable then?”

The modern student is not competing with classmates any more. They are competing with algorithms, productivity influencers, 20-year-old start-up founders, and a machine that finishes assignments before we finish panicking. Somewhere along the way, failure stopped being the biggest fear. Irrelevance became bigger. Because failure at least feels temporary. You fail, you recover, life moves on. But irrelevance feels like disappearing quietly while the rest of the world keeps updating itself.

And social media does not help. Every time we open an app, somebody our age is launching something, winning something, building something, travelling somewhere, or somehow waking up at 5 a.m. voluntarily. Meanwhile, most students are just trying to survive one internal exam and remember whether today’s assignment was uploaded on Classroom, Moodle or that one WhatsApp group which has 999+ unread messages. What makes all this more exhausting is that productivity has now become performance. Rest feels illegal. Watching a movie comes with guilt. Taking a break feels like falling behind. A peaceful Sunday afternoon somehow turns into an existential crisis by 7 p.m.

Even friendships have changed a little. We ask each other less about happiness and more about plans. “What are you doing this summer?” “Any internships?” “Higher studies?” “Start-up?” “Research?” “Content creation?” Nobody asks “Are you okay?” Ironically, this generation may be the most connected generation ever, yet one of the loneliest. We constantly witness the polished highlight reels of other people’s lives while sitting beside our own unfinished drafts. But maybe students were never supposed to live like constantly updating software.

Maybe not every moment needs optimisation. Maybe some dreams are allowed to grow slowly and privately. Maybe a person’s worth cannot always be measured through certificates, reach, followers or productivity trackers. And maybe the most revolutionary thing a student can do today is to remain human in a world obsessed with performance. To create without always posting. To rest without guilt. To learn without monetising. To exist without constantly proving existence. Because long after trends disappear and algorithms change, people will still remember sincerity, depth, humour, kindness and curiosity. Things no AI can fully automate. At least for now.

abhilaxmi1730@gmail.com