If you had asked me what I 
wanted most in life just one year 
ago, I would have buoyantly 
responded with: a book deal 
and a successful writing career. 
As 
my 
aptitude 
for 
setting 
professional goals stretches back 
even further — a circled “1500” 
signaling my goal SAT score, a 
nine-page recount of a leadership 
development conference I went 
to when I was 17 and a crisply 
flattened picture of me and my 
mom after we toured Vanderbilt 
are among the many artifacts 
of 
my 
high 
school 
journal. 
Preoccupied by the stress of 
standardized tests and classwork, 
the purple ink in that journal is 
the mark of a person dominated 
by an almost entirely different set 
of standards and values from the 
person I am now.
In the years since, as my 
anxiety has escalated, many of 
my professional goals have been 
drowned out by the cacophony of 
my own thoughts. Success, in my 
mind, used to take the shape of 
a degree from a university many 
people perceive to be “great” and 
a job that people perceive to be 
equally as “great.” Now, success 
takes the shape of my hands — 
steady, unflinching from anxiety 
— and a mind that hasn’t worried 
itself sick wandering to the “Worst 
Case Scenario.” I’ve watched my 
world fold in on itself, watched 
the measurable goals that once 
constituted my life’s meaning 
dissolve like unstirred honey at 

the bottom of a teacup: sticky, too 
concentrated to be useful. While 
I used to think of my life in years, 
I now think of it in days — if not 
hours. Within the last year, the 
scale of my life shrunk as my 
anxiety grew, completely shifting 
the standards I hold myself to: 
What I want most in life now is, 
most prominently, to be at peace 
with myself, followed by people to 
love and be loved by and financial 
stability.
Although my anxious thought 
patterns were the most pervasive 
this last summer and fall semester, 
these patterns are still very much 
muscle memory. Catastrophizing 
that phone call with a friend that 
was a few minutes too short is 
now second nature; impulsively 
playing mental reruns of daily 
interactions and overthinking 
fleeting moments of eye contact 
are now habits.
In the throes of my anxiety, the 
last thing I was thinking about 
was a future career, or a new 
club to join. And now, as I live 
alongside the remnants of that 
anxiety, I struggle to look beyond 
what’s currently in front of me. 
Recursive and overpowering, my 
anxious thought patterns dizzy 
me. They extend beyond the point 
of attempting to make plans for 
a future that seems so abstract. 
Because the more I think, the less 
my thoughts make sense; and the 
less my thoughts make sense, the 
more I think. At the height of my 
anxiety, all I wanted was control 
over myself and my thoughts — 
which is why I so incessantly 
relied on these familiar, albeit 
destructive, patterns. I believed 

that if I played back these 
moments enough times I could 
eventually rewrite them. It was a 
cruel iteration of the very human 
craving for comfort by way of 
habits and familiarity.
It’s no secret that humans are 
creatures of habit, and, as a self-
proclaimed organized, type-A 
person, I’ve always prided myself 
on maintaining a specific brand 
of habits: prioritizing school 

even at the cost of my sleep or 
wellbeing, filling out my planner 
months in advance, never leaving 
my bed unmade. However, my 
anxious mind preyed on my 
affinity for structure and turned 
it on its head. In my most anxious 
months, there was no place that 
felt as safe to wander as the 
well-worn paths of the same 
“Worst Case Scenarios” I had 
played out in my head hundreds 

of times before. While I knew 
that my shaking hands and these 
nightmares that had become my 
perennial bedtime stories were 
not sustainable, I didn’t know 
how to break the cycle I was in.
Although many articles on 
coping with anxiety suggest 
a formal, or at the very least 
concerted, effort to analyze your 
thought patterns and/or use stress 
management techniques, I did not 

feel like I had the space to take a 
step back and think about why my 
mind was going the places it was. 
Instead, over the next several 
months, I began noticing parts 
of daily interactions that made 
me grateful — not just anxious 
— to be experiencing the day I 
was experiencing. This wasn’t 
even a choice I remember actively 

OLIVIA MOURADIAN
Statement Columnist 

Restructuring my ambition & other beginnings

Design by Pheobe Unwin

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

S T A T E M E N T

8 — Wednesday, April 19, 2023
 The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 

I spent this year’s Spring Break 
in Utah with a group of 11 other 
University of Michigan students, 
most of whom I hadn’t met before. 
We embarked on a trip with the 
Michigan Backpacking Club, and 
had been paired together based 
on our preferred spring break 
destination 
and 
daily 
hiking 
distance. The plan was to spend a 
week driving through the southern 
part of the state, following good 
weather, and to enjoy as much time 
in the backcountry as possible.
In backpacking communities, 
there are certain “iconic” hikes 
that convey a level of status and 
expertise: climbing the steep 
granite crest of Half Dome in 
Yosemite, summiting Mount St. 
Helens, descending 6,000 feet into 
the bottom of the Grand Canyon 
and coming back up again. We 
were in Zion National Park, in part, 
to complete one of those iconic 
hikes. More than half of my group 
had no real hiking or backpacking 
experience, but this trip was about 
to establish our place among 
“serious backpackers”: we were 
going to complete Angels Landing. 
On paper, Angels Landing is a 

deceptively short, 5.4 mile hike 
that covers a modest 1,488 feet of 
elevation gain. For the last half 
mile, however, hikers cross over a 
narrow rock formation that’s just 
a few feet wide in certain spots. 
Metal chains have been drilled 
into the rock to support hikers 
in segments that are too steep to 
complete unassisted. One wrong 
move, one misplaced step or 
moment of hesitation, and you’ll 
fall nearly 5,000 feet into the red 
canyon below. 
Angels Landing started out as 
a loose suggestion: Wouldn’t it be 
fun to do it if we were going to Zion 
anyway? But for some members 
of my backpacking group, it 
became an obsession. Individuals 
in my group with improper 
equipment (crampons are strongly 
recommended in icy conditions) 
insisted on attempting the trek 
anyway, and attempts to dissuade 
them from putting themselves in 
the way of undue danger turned 
into a screaming match. One 
person even admitted that they 
had only signed up to make the 
30-hour drive to southern Utah 
with the backpacking club to hike 
Angels Landing. 
In the end, most of my group — 
myself included — did complete 
the hike. It was stunning and 
strenuous 
and 
everything 

everyone had described it as. It 
would be untrue to say that it 
didn’t live up to the hype. But I felt 
a strange disconnection between 
Angels Landing as a physical place 
and embodied experience and 
Angels Landing as an ideal. 
I 
began 
to 
suspect 
there 
was something deeper to the 
way certain hikes and outdoor 
experiences convey status — that 
for some people, it really wasn’t 
about enjoying nature, but about 
something else entirely. This 
thought lingered in the back of my 
mind throughout the trip. Again 
and again, comments would come 
up that made me return to this: 
We should hit all five National 
Parks in Utah just to say we did 
it, we can just go to the visitor 
centers.
I don’t want to spend three days 
in Capitol Reef National Park; no 
one has ever heard of that. 
Why were we so obsessed with 
having certain experiences and 
how had their subjective value in 
our collective imagined warped 
my experience on my trip? There 
was an unspoken agreement that 
we would rather visit certain high-
profile attractions in a superficial 
way — stopping at the visitor 
center, checking out the scenic 
overlook and then leaving — than 
spend more time hiking less iconic 

spots. Was the visitor center at 
Bryce Canyon really worth more 
than three days of backpacking in 
Capitol Reef? 
Overconsumption 
has 
been 
written 
about 
extensively. 
Overconsumption of new, trendy 
and low-cost clothes is fueling 
the fast fashion industry, which 
contributes to climate change 
and the exploitation of low-paid 
garment workers in the Global 
South. 
Overconsumption 
of 
social media is divorcing people 
from real life and contributing 
to a crisis of loneliness and 
isolation, especially for teens. 
Overconsumption contributes to 
a deep, psychological unhappiness 
where more is the ultimate goal — 
and where there is no longer any 
pleasure in enjoying the everyday 
or familiar.
Notably, 
critiques 
of 
overconsumption 
have 
almost 
exclusively focused on physical 
goods. This is unsurprising — it’s 
easy to cite how overconsumption 
contributes to hoarding, excessive 
shopping hauls and social media 
companies’ 
mandate 
to 
get 
people to spend more and more 
time online. But is it possible to 
“overconsume” experiences? 
I used to think it was impossible. 
In fact, I constantly worried I 
was disengaging from real life, 

too caught up with whatever was 
on my phone, on my computer or 
lingering in my mind to deeply 
experience what was around me. 
Now, I’m convinced that it is, in 
fact, possible. 
Overconsumption 
isn’t 
just 
for the tangible. The same logic 
that 
demands 
we 
constantly 
pursue newness is pushing us to 
live shallow, disengaged lives. 
It makes no difference if you 
experience something deeply, all 
that matters is that you experience 
it. Overconsumption is coming for 
real life, too. 
*** 
Once I started thinking about 
overconsuming 
experiences, 
I began to see it everywhere. 
The most egregious example 
was BookTok. BookTok is an 
influential 
corner 
of 
TikTok 
dedicated 
to 
reading 
and 
reviewing books. I am, admittedly, 
not a regular viewer of BookTok 
content, mostly because I don’t 
like to read Young Adult novels 
anymore (despite being marketed 
towards teens, the genre has 
taken a hold on chronically 
online 20-somethings). But more 
importantly, I had an aversion to 
the community’s obsession with 
their “read counts” — how many 
books they had read in a given 
week, month or year.
I admit that this may seem like 
a hollow critique — the point of 
books is, after all, to read them. On 
BookTok, however, read counts 
are the ultimate indicator of 
status. Creators will boast about 
completing 100 books in a year. 
Not only is this reading volume 
unrealistic for the average person, 
it’s hardly aspirational. To meet 
these lofty reading goals, creators 
offer their viewers tips on how 
to finish novels faster, such as 
listening to audiobooks at double 
speed. Here, the novel functions 
more like a Zoom lecture that a 
reader just needs to get through 
than something to be engaged 
with and enjoyed. Other tricks 
that these influencers tout include 
skimming long passages of text 
and opting for shorter texts like 
novellas or graphic novels. The 
imperative is clear: read a book so 
you check another item off your 
to-read list, not because you’re 
actually interested in the text. 
Of course, there’s an element 
of traditional, commodity-based 
overconsumption 
to 
BookTok. 
Novels are primarily a tangible 
good, and literary influence has 
made substantive critiques of how 
literary communities encourage 

consumerism. 
Nevertheless, 
BookTok’s 
incessant 
pressure 
to finish more and more titles 
suggests it’s not just about owning 
an excessive amount of books. 
Reading becomes a means to an 
end, devoid of any critical analysis 
or enjoyment. 
Overconsumption is, at its core, 
about making yourself palatable 
and interpretable to others. Real-
life overconsumption is largely 
driven by self-presentation. If 
someone tells you they read five 
books last year, it certainly tells 
you something about them. But if 
they say they read 100 books last 
year, or even 30, it’s a clear signal 
of who they are. That person is a 
reader, embodying a particular 
aesthetic that comes with the 
title. Other facts about that person 
are irrelevant, because reader 
provides a neat rubric through 
which they can become legible. 
In an essay for Bustle, author 
Stephanie Danler describes her 
foray into BookTok. Danler, who’s 
novel “Sweetbitter” was popular 
among 
reading 
accounts 
on 
Instagram, joined TikTok to stay 
up-to-date with literary trends, 
but found that the app was more 
about 
successfully 
performing 
aesthetics than actual content. 
“On it, you can’t just show a book 
by Clarice Lispector,” Danler 
writes. “The successful accounts 
performed being a ‘woman who 
reads Clarice Lispector.’ ”
The same is true of outdoor 
communities. 
Visiting 
one 
national 
park 
is 
a 
weak 
signal 
of 
someone’s 
identity. 
Overconsumption, 
however, 
provides a neat way to translate a 
narrow set of experiences into a 
fully formed idea of a person. In 
my mind, I can picture the kind of 
person who visits all five national 
parks in Utah. The line “I’ve hiked 
Angel’s Landing and Half Dome 
and Mount Saint Helens” makes 
it immediately clear to me who 
someone is. If they’re a woman, 
they’re 
probably 
a 
“granola 
girl” or if they’re a guy, they’re 
probably a “dirtbag” — a brand of 
outdoorsman who “is committed 
to a given (usually extreme) 
lifestyle to the point of abandoning 
employment and other societal 
norms in order to pursue said 
lifestyle.” It’s less about what 
particular 
archetype 
someone 
embodies, but more that living 
that archetype allows everything 
about them to fall into place. 

HALEY JOHNSON
Statement Correspondent

Overconsumption is coming for real life, too

Design by Grace Filbin

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

