April Fools: Finding Friends

Considering how closely-knit the community at St. Lawrence University is, it is not hard to randomly bump into the same person over and over again. Look in from the outside, and you might hear us faintly singing Kumbaya together. Pay slightly more attention though, and you can also hear our complete lack of enthusiasm for it.   

As noted in our previous issue, the circle of trust at SLU keeps dwindling. At this point, you might actually find one graduating senior who has been best friends with almost every single person during their time here.   

Upon hearing the possibility of such a scenario, my friend Muhammed Mahdi ’26 made a somewhat interesting observation about claiming closeness with that many people. “You can truly know a person by how many friend groups they go through,” he said. “The more, the worse the person is.”  

My roommate, Margot Bouchery ’25, isn’t that person, partly because exchange students are rarely the focal point of SLU graduation ceremonies and partly because she is “too cool for friends.” It should also be noted that Margot knows more people from the seven months she has been here than some others nearing the end of their sophomore year, such as myself.   

Sure, it’s nice to go to Dana with a different friend group every other day. But honestly, I’ve never been much of a numbers person, given the eclectic mix of faces I occasionally mistake for furniture when coming out of the room. And yes, if it wasn’t clear already, I initially envisioned this article as a hit piece against extroverts and friendly people. The ongoing loneliness epidemic keeps forgetting how their energy levels are rising as ours gets depleted day by day.   

In a 2023 Meta-Gallup survey, about one in four adults worldwide reported having felt a sense of chronic isolation. Judging by Mirko Dibra ’26’s statement: “There are a few people I’d die for, which are my friends.” You’d think that SLU students are immune to this kind of thing, given their world-renowned networking skills.   

There is something cult-ish in long-term friend groups. Everyone’s faces begin to blend in, and the picky-eater jokes become repetitive (but endearingly so since I am the one making them). You’d begin to despise the tediousness of it all if the other option wasn’t so much worse. We could have nearly a million followers on Instagram, but the idea of friendship and belonging is as foreign a concept as poverty to some people here.   

Loneliness is exhausting. Really. It costs you your sleep, your mental health, your grades, your job prospects, all that stuff. We wish that we could just snap away at it until it magically leaves, but then I would probably have had to write about something else on this lovely day.   

We live on a campus where people huddle together and curse at the snow to pass their time. Life is often a slog, and sometimes those years will pass by, and you’ll still be searching for that little huddle. It’s a long and often painful process, but that is how change tends to be. As Sofia Marcero ’26 points out, “It’s about understanding that you’re here and you meet people and do your thing with them.” People uproot themselves to find their cure for loneliness until they finally find it sitting there inconspicuously in a roasting session only their best friends can effectively organize.  

 Andrew Holland ’26 refers to such relentless teasing as a “love language.” Not everyone speaks it, but that sense of isolation rarely lingers when there’s someone else in the room who sees you and embraces you for what you are. And in that moment, as we all burst into fits of laughter, I came to a rather obvious conclusion about my sources for this article: They were indeed idiots.