Why the first lecture back is always the most pointless

You’re sitting in some building you haven’t been to before watching some academic drone on and you just can’t seem to get your eyes to open up for more than 5 seconds. Yes, you guessed it! It’s the first lecture of the semester!

This lecture is always the worst, you’ve had a little bit of a break filled with post exam partying so the prospect of listening to someone talk about the structure of your module for an hour physically makes you sick. Frankly you’re going to be spending most of your time looking around to see what anyone could possibly be writing down, trying not to fall asleep and having another glance around because you saw someone fit the first time.

How can you be bored? You’ll ask yourself… You were going to be more committed this term! You were going to spend less money, use the contact hours, and actually answer questions in tutorials! But since you already are… Why not… Just this once… skip the rest of the day…? Actually, why not the rest of the week? the year? Why not become an isolated sheep herder living in the outer hebridean islands because “fuck capitalism, man”? I mean, just a little proletariat uprising couldn’t hurt… Right? After all, both you and your lecturer know you’ve just spent the weekend both attempting to sort your life out and screaming about your freedom to a 35% bottle of Vodka you thought was called Steve. You also both know which one of those activities you enjoyed most.

Enough of these silly dreams you’ll tell yourself, you’ve committed yourself to this situation and Karl Marx will just have to wait. It’s not all bad, maybe that lad you saw earlier will be in your tutorials…

But seriously, who has actually left a first lecture without reassessing their whole life due to an ever looming sense of meaninglessness?