Stumbling through the door of your Uni halls, vision blurred and loudly singing your favourite song as your housemates groan at your intrusive and thunderous entrance. I think it’s safe to say we’ve all been in this position if you’ve experienced the carnage of Freshers, for better or worse. Last Friday, we had invited the flat next door round to have some drinks before we went out, various spirits were scattered across the table, together forming the cocktail of drinks that would turn us all into the bumbling idiots we were all destined to be. Each drink gave me new motivation, motivation to be accepted by my peers, to be at the same level of intoxication they were so I could keep up with their antics. It was about midnight in which I became fully aware of the situation, aware being a strong word, more vaguely conscious of what was happening around me, that collectively we were not in the best position. As we wondered down the student -filled streets, I couldn’t help but feel slightly melancholy that to enjoy each others’ company in this light, we had to be drunk off our faces and dancing somewhere you couldn’t even hear anyone speak. It was during this mini-epiphany I realised the rest of my group had turned a corner that I unfortunately had not. Dazed and confused I tried to retrace my steps and happened upon another group of students, all of them seeming similarly displaced from reality. Six minutes later, we were all stood on a park bench, singing ‘Stay with me,’ with the belief that, collectively, we were Sam Smith.

The real mystery is why we let ourselves talk each other into it, spending the night out means sacrificing the day after. You just need to ask yourself if the day is worth sacrificing. So why do we engage in such activities at an almost constant rate when we are fully aware of the consequences that will befall us? We, as humans, have a deep desire to be social. We want to be accepted, to be welcomed into a group of people and to feel comfortable being with them. Drinking is a social activity. You can argue the point but there’s no denying that most of us talk a whole lot more with some alcohol inside of us, this leads to the barriers and filters we would usually have in place to fall, enabling us to fully inhibit the social butterfly we want to be. I, along with everyone else, am the kind of person that wants to be liked, so if the initiation for that is to drink a lot, then we will naturally go along with it. Thinking back to it, I remember the evening going though it’s natural progression of social awkwardness to simply overconfident blabbering and the destruction of all social conventions. However, at the same time as we become social, we also become selfish, we want to be the centre of attention and get jealous if we are not. The whole process seems to be a paradox of itself in a way.

Altogether it was a good night as a whole, once I found my own flat (and brought an army of strangers from the street with me) we all got along well and had a good time. Again, we were all aware of the consequences of such a night, but it didn’t bother us, we were living for the moment, and in living for the moment many of us made mistakes that we would come to regret. It’s all part of it. So how can making mistakes, throwing the rules that make social interaction work to the skies and giving ourselves swollen heads the next morning all alleviate to what we consider the most social and communal thing to do? It comes down to the fact that life is warped, in every single way. So it only makes sense that, to enjoy it, we ourselves need to be warped.