Synpaedia | Main / Second Year Synergy Breakdown

A certain percentage of Synners seek out the house because of their alienation from campus life. Their reasons vary greatly. For some, its political. They're looking for a place to explore alternative lifestyles (or at least voice alternative lifestyles). Others don't even know what they're looking for. They just know that they haven't found it. And they despair of finding it. They're on the edge of casting off this whole college thing and moving to Portland. So they select what they imagine is the most alternative house on campus.

And it's great. Not because the house is particularly political or alternative, but because, somehow they found those three or four people who were also looking for something indescribable, and they bonded so tightly with those people that they couldn't see how they lived before they met them. They didn't really want anything particularly out of the ordinary. They didn't necessarily want to cook their own food, or do their own cleaning. Consensus didn't affect their lives one way or another.

They just wanted to be able to turn to someone else, and convey, without particular word or deed, that something about this life was indescribably strange. And they wanted for that person to turn back to them, similarly wordlessly, and say, "You know what? You're right, and it's okay. Because we'll figure it out together." That's what community is about. And community is something Syn is good at. Oftentimes its peoples' last, desperate attempt to right themselves before flunking out. That community saves them.

And that's not unique to Synergy. People on campus find that sort of salvation every year. They find it in Kairos or Columbae. They find it in fraternities and sororities. They find it in church groups or the Daily. They find it on the frisbee team or some other parallel construction that I'm too lazy to come up with. It's just about forging some sort of bond with some other person.

But, remember that's just the first step those kids took towards achieving some sort of satisfaction. And they're smart, but they're also busy and distracted. They're stuck in the middle of all this mess that's going down. They have to figure out their lives in the intervals between class and mooning over the girl who lives across the hall.

So they reach the natural conclusion. They decide that as long as everything about the house stays the same, that feeling will stay the same. They decide that if they can live here another year and keep everything exactly the same, they can hold onto that feeling of rightness that came as such a revelation to them.

These people often become the most devout true believers in the Syn community. They stay on and manage. They struggle through the year. And they discover that everything is not the same. Oh, they'll attribute it to the little things. This change in rooming policy. That change in manager compensation. Some other bull about how people are "less considerate" than they used to be.

But the truth is that they're the ones who are different. They're no longer in that desperate frame of mind they once were, where they'd reach out to anything and everything that could save them, and ignore the little peculiarities. And that's healthy. Because they did that, and it helped them alot. It made them much better, more stable, more well-rounded people. And now they notice all the little things they dislike about the house. But they still feel chained to it by nostalgia.

The highs are not as high. They've become busier. They can't enjoy the little cultural quirks of the house as much. Some of their friends have moved out. Others have just moved on and become more involved in the minutiae of their own lives. And they don't have that same desperate, driving, need, so they can't become good friends with the new people who've moved in (the people who are forging their own little groups).

But, because the last year was so good, their disillusionment is much too great for them to just swallow their disappointment and tough out the year. They demand more out of their lives than merely okay. So they drop out, transfer to another house, or move to a Dead House.

And that's as it should be.