I am writing this from my childhood bedroom in New Jersey, which is either a confession or a thesis statement, depending on how you feel about spring break.
Everyone else, it seems, went somewhere. And not just somewhere — somewhere with a coordinated itinerary, a shared Airbnb, and a group chat that’s been vibrating since January with the energy of people committed to having a good time.
According to a survey of 1,000 college students, 56.78% of student loan borrowers going on spring break are using their loan money to fund the trip — refund checks meant for rent and textbooks are rerouted toward a week in the sun. In other words, spring break is not cheap, but for a lot of people, it isn’t really optional either. Not because anyone is requiring them to go, but because the social cost of not going has become its own kind of tax.
More than six in 10 Gen Zers feel pressured to spend money to keep up with others, and those feelings are sending them into debt. Every generation has felt this way; the anxiety of watching someone else have more, look better, and live bigger is nothing new. But no generation has had a swipe-up link waiting for them at the bottom of that feeling. We have, as a generation, figured out how to financialize that feeling, and I say that with genuine admiration for the audacity of it.
I’m a transfer student, which means I arrived in January without a group, without a history here, and without any particular investment in where anyone was going for break. This made my decision to take an $80 train home fairly simple, but I don’t think you need my specific circumstances to arrive at the same place. You just need to be honest, for a moment, about what you actually need over the break versus what you think the week is supposed to look like.
Going home doesn’t have a tagline or a group chat, which is probably why it keeps losing to the beach. No one has ever made a movie called, “Spring Break: Quietly Eating Dinner With Your Parents.” And yet, there’s an ease to going or being somewhere that doesn’t require anything from you: no itinerary, no consensus, no low-grade performance of having a good time for an audience that is mostly performing right back at you.
Midsemester, when the weight of everything has been sitting on your shoulders so long you’ve stopped registering it, something as simple as a kitchen that smells like freshly made dinner can do more for you than a week of sunshine.
Staying in your dorm or apartment is its own version of this. The city running at a different speed, a week that moves at your pace for once, the rare experience of time that hasn’t already been claimed by something. For the students who are working over break — because rent doesn’t negotiate and the academic calendar means nothing to a landlord — that counts too, more than the conversation around spring break tends to admit.
The dominant image of spring break — warm, loud, expensive, and extremely well documented — is a perfectly valid way to spend a week. I’m not here to confiscate anyone’s beach photos, but the students who went home or stayed behind aren’t missing out on spring break. They’re having a version of it that doesn’t photograph as well, costs considerably less, and might, if they let it, turn out to be exactly what they needed.
