I recently experienced a very stereotypical college evening in which piling into a room with friends seemed like the most productive environment to finish pages upon pages of reading. Unsurprisingly, the reading was replaced with discussion of everything but Kant’s views on reason. I was able to justify the distraction, however, based on some realizations it gave me about college habits I should consider avoiding. Kant remained unread, but I made strides toward becoming a less self-focused individual.

A friend of mine is on the United Student Labor Action Coalition, a group on campus concerned with the rights of the custodial and food service staff. While I pretended my sixty pages of Kant did not exist, my friend described the compromised rights of the janitorial staff and the ridiculous expectations for their productivity each day. One of these expectations is that they must clean ten program houses by the end of a seven and a half hour shift. I suddenly felt completely ignorant to the plight of the woman who sings along to Spanish radio while cleaning my dorm’s less than presentable bathrooms as the sun comes up. It is absolutely unreal that I can see someone every morning and only know her taste in music. This discovery made me feel less than admirable.

I have found that in college my awareness of my surroundings has drastically decreased. For the first time, my entire life is based upon what I want to do without any real consideration for others. Self-absorption like this makes us selfish and oblivious, two fairly obvious qualities when we consider where we live. In our dorms and houses, there is absolutely no one who will reprimand us on our less than stellar habits. Even when we ignore the messes we make, they still exist. They exist for the woman already pressed for time who must clean an entire dorm building in only a few hours.

College is an in-between world where we’re independent but can still depend on some “invisible” force to clean up after us. We view this force as faceless because it is convenient to do so. It is easy to look past the woman cleaning up the bathroom after drunken weekend disasters and avoid feelings of guilt, to dismiss her because she provides a service and is therefore somehow less entitled to our sympathy.

I have realized how essential it is to recognize whom we view as faceless and why we do it. Consider the moment when you say “hi” to someone you’ve definitely met, and they either don’t respond or show zero recognition of who you are. We’ve all been on both sides of this situation. Your smile and wave creates an unbelievable feeling of awkwardness, or you breeze past someone because your mind is on something else. Our personal spheres sometimes remain impenetrable to everyone and everything because we can get away with it. We can get away with not saying “thank you” to the person who swipes us in for lunch or makes us our coffee. We can go out and exist in the world and look past all of these people we interact with because we let our selfishness and lack of awareness rule us. We are isolated, and it is a little sickening.

Stepping outside of each of our bubbles requires little effort and ensures at least some consciousness of the people around us. The gesture can be as simple as “hello” and “thank you,” or some small talk. Making strides toward some common courtesy is not difficult, and it makes us better, happier people. We cannot pretend we are alone when we are not alone. There is a time for self-absorption, but it is not in the presence of others.