Several older students told me that everyone in grad school eventually enters the "bitter grad student" phase in their career, and I think that time is around now. I don't even have to talk to other people about grad school and research to realize this. I've noticed that many people I talk to don't have any enthusiasm to do anything...social or otherwise. For the past few months, getting people together to do something fun has been (and still is) like pulling teeth. I usually get some variation of the excuse "when I get home from lab I just want to sit and do nothing," which makes me wonder (a) if I'm not working hard enough in lab, since I still have energy, and (b) if I get cabin fever way faster than everyone I know.
I think part of the problem is that by now, we've settled into a life of routine...we get up, go to lab, do work, come back, and crash, only to repeat this cycle 6 or 7 days a week for the next couple years until our advisors say we can graduate. While routine can be comforting (sometimes), it also is a recipe for isolation. And after a long time, it becomes a hard habit to break. The other problem is that we're surrounded by the same people day after day, and opportunities to meet new people who aren't in the same field (or the same lab, for that matter) are scarce to nonexistent.
One of my friends goes to med school at MSU and he came to visit several weeks ago. We talked about some of the trends we've seen in people as we go through grad school: the pessimism, isolation, and general laziness which gets progressively worse with time. He said that the best way to combat it is with optimism, "impatient optimism" to be specific. (The phrase came from a graduation speech that Bill Gates supposedly gave at Harvard.) It means to be happy, but also to be proactive in pursuing the activities that bring happiness.
I really think I've been trying to get people together, but it's not working. At the same time, I've also looked into other activities that branch off of what I liked to do when I was younger (dance, for instance) as a way to fulfill my mental health time. Several people have told me that I should stop trying so hard, but I don't think that passivity is the best way to solve this problem.
I don't think I've ever felt more alone in my life.
