Walk into any dining hall and you’ll see it — laptops open, podcasts in one ear, news in the other. Someone is reading Kafka for fun. Someone else is on their fourth doomscroll of the hour. A third person is drafting a hot take about how nobody thinks deeply anymore.

We are, by almost every measure, the most information-saturated generation in history. And yet, thinking itself increasingly feels like something we perform rather than something we do.

A trend floating around productivity circles calls this “friction-maxxing,” or deliberately making life harder to force discipline. Wake up at 5 a.m., delete shortcuts and embrace discomfort. In theory, it’s about self-improvement. But, on a college campus, it often becomes something else — competitive suffering. Who slept least, who worked longest and who looks most visibly exhausted? Effort stops being a means to an end and instead becomes an identity.

At the other extreme is doomscrolling — the daily loop of absorbing war, climate collapse, political dysfunction and campus drama in the same breath as a funny video of a dog. It isn’t ignorance. It’s overexposure without structure. Everything feels urgent and nothing resolves. You feel informed and completely powerless at once.

Between these two extremes, thinking itself starts to change shape. Friction-maxxing turns effort into something visible, something to prove. Doomscrolling turns information into something to react to instantly. Together, they create an environment where thinking is less about process and more about presentation.

This becomes clear through performative intellectualism. By this, I mean treating thinking as something displayed, measured by how it sounds, how quickly it lands and how others perceive it, rather than something you work through. It shows up in the seminar answer designed to signal fluency more than curiosity, the group chat reference meant to impress rather than illuminate, the Instagram caption quoting someone obscure.

It looks like thought, but it is often optimized for the appearance of thought.

On the other hand is the supposed opposite — anti-intellectualism framed as authenticity. Not a rejection of knowledge itself, but a rejection of analysis as unnecessary or inauthentic, preferring reaction over interpretation. Why analyze when you can just feel? Why interpret when you can just live?

But this, too, is a posture. It is not a rejection of performance, just a different style of it.

Today, you can see both in the same room. One person performs close reading like it’s a sport, citing page numbers unprompted, steering every conversation toward the text they’ve already mastered. Another refuses the whole apparatus. “I just think it’s interesting,” they say, closing the question before it opens. Both are protecting themselves from the same thing — being caught actually thinking, mid-process, without a position ready.

These aren’t opposites. They are mirror images. Both assume thinking is something separate from living, something to display or reject, rather than something you do while you are living.

And in that space between performance and refusal, real conviction becomes harder to find. Not because students are incapable of it, but because very little in the environment rewards it.

Uncertainty is socially risky, especially in a setting where everyone is constantly being evaluated — academically, socially and even algorithmically. Thinking out loud without a conclusion can feel like exposing a lack of competence. It is safer to arrive with a position or to reject the need for one entirely than to be seen forming one in real time.

Lectures reward the confident answer, not the uncertain one. Algorithms reward the sharp take, not the slowly formed thought. Social life rewards having a position, not changing one.

Classes reward the student who arrives with a reading, not the one who loses their reading halfway through the discussion. The algorithm buries the thread that says, “I’m not sure about this yet” and surfaces the one that says, “Here’s exactly what’s wrong.” Even among friends, changing your mind can be read as a sign of weakness unless it’s framed as a revelation rather than a gradual shift. Socially, we make our opinions legible by stabilizing them. You are the person who “loves this,” who “hates that,” who “has always thought” something.

A slow change, softening a stance over time, reconsidering something without announcing it, doesn’t translate as easily. It’s harder to point to, harder to narrate, harder for others to recognize. So instead, change becomes something you perform all at once, a clean break between who you were and who you are now. What disappears is the middle — the part where your thinking is still in motion, not yet resolved into something tangible.

What gets excluded is not intelligence, but patience, the kind of thinking that doesn’t immediately resolve into a take, a brand or a stance.

This is not an argument to log off or romanticize a pre-Internet past. It is something simpler and more difficult — to resist turning every thought into either a performance or a refusal. Try sitting in a class and not raising your hand the moment you have something half-formed. Let the thought stay incomplete, even as the conversation moves on. Or admit, out loud, that a reading changed for you halfway through discussing it. Let yourself be unsure without turning that uncertainty into an identity. Change your mind without announcing it as a transformation.

College is one of the last spaces where being wrong, slowly and in public, is still part of learning. But that only matters if we resist the urge to turn thinking itself into something we perform.

Thinking has to be allowed to stay unfinished.

Shruthika Gopinath is a sophomore majoring in economics. 

Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.