The problem was evident before my class was in kindergarten, but it affects us today as college freshmen—and today, it is worse. College students were stressed fifteen years ago, according to this 2000 article on the website of the American Institute of Stress, and though a 2008 addendum stated that the problem had worsened in the intervening years, the article’s opening sounds eerily relevant today: “No time for sleep, no time for playing games, no time for going to parties. You must get that six-figure job, you have to get an “A” in this class, and you must succeed.”

I imagine that most of you have thought this, as I have for a little over three years. While I had participated in marching band and quiz bowl in ninth grade, I added on pit orchestra, traveling jazz band, a local music competition, County Band, and my first AP class—World History—in tenth grade. By the middle of March, I had burned out: I couldn’t devote enough time to any one thing to do it very well. But did I learn? While conceding pit orchestra, I took five AP classes in eleventh grade and four in twelfth, and became more involved in quiz bowl and PMEA bands. After all, there was so much to do, and colleges would be scrutinizing my accomplishments.

Somehow, I imagined without reading into the issue that once the college admissions process was over, college would be much less stressful than twelfth grade. But application essays have not ceased. Now there are scholarships, internships, and research opportunities, ways to earn money, gain skills, and prepare my resume for me to secure a career that will yield even more money later on, if I pass the interviews. Combine this with my hazy and labile conception of my career, and you can see some of the roots of stress and insecurity for me and many other college students.

Indeed, this is a national trend. This NY Times article from last month cited a recent survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2014,” that reported that significantly more freshmen feel depressed or overwhelmed than they did in 2009. Likely, many changes are driving down students’ mental health. That article posited that increased college student pressure to “compete in a global economy, and think they have to be on top of their game all the time” is one cause, as is the anxiety they may have developed by being overworked in high school. It also implicated students spending less time socializing and more time studying as a probable cause of stress and argued there is an optimal balance between work and play, and that universities should encourage students to find that balance rather than incessantly work harder. While the article said that drinking and smoking rates are declining nationally, signs that students are not resorting to unhealthy ways to cope with stress, students are increasingly socializing more with media and less in person, which can contribute to feelings of isolation.

Seventeen more causes for declines in students’ mental health appeared in this Psychology Today article. These causes range from students not developing personal life philosophies anymore, to students becoming narcissistic, to poor mental health care. Putting all of the causes together, I think that a large part, though certainly not the only part, of declines in mental health is increasing materialism, which dove-tails with an “I want it NOW because I DESERVE it” attitude. The aforementioned article mentions high school grade inflation fostering a sense of superiority, praising of assertiveness fostering a sense of entitlement, development of pills fostering underestimates of how difficult it can be to recover from diseases, and increased financial pressure fostering a sense that students must succeed, or else! To this, I would add that faster communication between students and ubiquity of Internet access has made us think that we deserve instant rewards for minor accomplishments, instant replies to our messages, and, even worse, that we must always be on our guard to make sure we don’t do anything stupid, or else our stupidity will be spread across social media in five seconds. Also, that our peers at Penn State are earning internships and scholarships pressures those of us who are not now to seek out these opportunities. Since many of us students come into college with (perhaps unrealistically) high expectations, we may feel like failures if we don’t get accepted into the programs that admitted our peers. Others’ success stories motivate us to succeed but don’t prepare us to fail.

All of this centralizes on materialism. Wanting lucrative careers, prestigious resumes, and flawless facades, we overlook why we really want them, why we need them as soon as possible, and what they really mean to us. Answering those subjective questions is certainly much harder than answering the questions of how much money your scholarship was worth or how many weeks your internship was. How to find fulfillment is a question many people ask, and beyond the scope of this blog—even if I did have the answers, which, as a 19-year-old freshman, I do not. I encourage all of you, though, to ask yourselves why you really want the things that you do and to do things that mean something to you, not to everyone else looking upon you. It will take some courage and discomfort, but is it worth the trouble if the alternative is more and more stressed and depressed college students across the country?