I don’t know how deep people’s memory goes, but when I talk to older generations about this stuff, they tell me all these stories about how kids at college in the 1960s were competing to be the wokest kid on the block. That’s not to say all kids at college were doing it then, and the word “woke” didn’t mean then what it means now, but the behavior of kids at college in the 1960s would not seem out of place in more recent decades, from the stories I heard.

Colleges were hotbeds of posturing and hypocrisy then as they are now. College kids are typically in the most radical years of their life, when they have the most freedom and desire to redefine who they are. They largely don’t have any money or accomplishments, so the big way up the social ladder is posturing and value signaling. If you’re more spiritual, more woke, more radical, then you get attention from your peers.

I don’t know what else to say, except people should spend more time hanging out across age groups, and people in college will eventually burn out of it. More people should take gap years, it lets it really sink in the reason why you’re in college in the first place, and it gives you more of a sense of how worthless posturing can be.

For these reasons and others, the college circuit is a real beast.