When alumni weekend rolls around, who actually cares? Whitman’s development office, for sure, and the greek system.

Fraternities get their old alumni back who want to have a good time and relive their carefree youth and the college has various activities planned to showcase itself. Now, there’s an element of nostalgia involved because at some level, growing up is a process in learning to be inauthentic.

What I mean is, when you get old, you’ve got to get a job. Maybe your boss isn’t very pleasant. Maybe your co-workers are really boring and aren’t fun to hang out with. Well, suck it up. Paycheck’s on the line. You learn to be more pragmatic.

After college, you don’t have a regular group of people you see anymore; no common classes, common schedule and common living space. Who knows where you’ll live? What if it’s Milwaukee? Or back home with the folks?

In a sense, then, we’re radically alone after college. We’ve lost the predetermined schedule and space that we’ve had since we were in kindergarten.

Our friends graduate and return to small Whitman enclaves in Seattle or Portland or spread out across the country. Regardless, part of what happens is loss.

But what kind of loss? I’ve heard from a few recent college graduates that after graduation, “drinking just isn’t as fun.” That is, bars are overrated: more expensive, stranger people and you have to drive everywhere. The sense of community is lacking.

And that’s exactly why alumni come back. Modern adult life often loses that sense of community because our relationships become mediated by work. Now why? Economic dislocation or the seductive vacuum of material consumption.

The very nature of an object, like a nice bottle of wine or your new shiny iPod touch, is that they can’t talk back. We, as human beings, can master them. You finish drinking the bottle of wine and you learn how to operate the iPod touch with all the new gadgets.

We can get bored of the same objects, so we’ve got to buy new ones when the ones we have go out of style. Thus, this delusion about objects makes all our other relationships subservient even though the whole idea of a bottle of nice wine is to drink it with someone else.

Can you get bored of a person? Or a community? What would that entail? For one thing, you’d have to be able to understand someone in their totality to be bored of them. You’d have to know every tick, every need, every habit and every aspect of that person. Is that possible?

Probably not, so what happens when people think they get bored with one another? It’s because we don’t try. It’s the pretension of knowing someone else and making them predictable. The very condition of us being free is that we’re capable of surprising each other and hence, capable of not being boring.

Well, what does this mean for the alumni? If adult life isn’t satisfied with mere material consumption then what’s missing? A community. Because all our lives, we’ve had a community in some shape or form.

It’s that community, constituted by a mutual understanding, that gives us an assurance that we are not alone in any sense. After college, we have to specialize in a specific job. That’s why people say the friends you make in college are the friends you keep for life.

It’s not that after college, you learn to be fake; rather, you learn to be practical and deal with a much broader range of people. In college, not so much, no matter how much diversity there is. And in this bubble, we have an unique opportunity to grow and develop relationships unmediated by practical concerns, although the networking train is coming up fast.

There’s something strange that happens between the ages of 18 and 22 that make these four years somehow more important than any other four years for the rest of your life. Hopefully, we’ll get our one weekend a year to recapture what’s happening in our lives now.