College is meant for discovery; it’s a place you go in order to learn new things, meet new people, and explore new horizons. It’s a place of growth, of exploration, of learning who you are. For one UNT freshman, however, the only new thing they seem to be learning about themselves is that they are very, very lonely.
Ali Abargil is a Technical Communications Major who has just begun his second semester at the University of North Texas. While he says his classes are going well, he claims that he has recently come to terms with the fact that he has no real friends on campus.
“See, last semester, I had a bunch of friends, We all sat at the same table in one of my Math classes, and we would chat breeze for the 15 minutes it took for the class to start, it was a riot,” Ali explained, “When Finals rolled around, We all got each others numbers and swore we would call each other, but all of December, I never got a single text from any of them. I could have called them, I guess, but I just never got around to it.”
Despite trying various methods to remedy his situation, including gloomily sitting at a park bench and waiting to be approached by sympathetic strangers, Ali has said he has had little luck in meeting anyone new. He even went on to describe a tragic encounter with one of his former friends.
“I forgot what his name was, but he was my best friend, and I saw him just yesterday in the Environmental Science building. We were walking down a hallway and wound up looking each other right in the eyes. Neither of us said a word, and we just kept walking. It was a long hallway too, we were staring at each other for a while, it was so awkward.”
Ali is not the only one; up to 64 percent of College students report having feelings of loneliness, with studies claiming that lonely students are 4 times more likely to experience severe psychological distress. Yet despite these frightening statistics, there is light at the end of the tunnel. In the words of Ali Abargil himself,
“Well, whenever I get sad, I usually just fire up Pornhub again; that always helps”.
