Dearest Peers,

I come to you with great news…HARVARD HAS DONE IT AGAIN!

After nearly four centuries of educating presidents, Nobel laureates, and people who drop out freshman fall to be yet another Y Combinator kid with an AI startup, the College has turned its formidable intellectual focus toward perhaps its greatest challenge yet: getting undergraduates to stop looking at Instagram during dinner.

The solution? A pouch?

Dean Deming announced that Harvard will “experiment” with voluntary phone pouches designed to facilitate tech-free socialization, which is an incredible sentence, because I was previously under the impression that this technology already existed. I believe it is called a “pocket.”

However, I can understand where he’s coming from. There is something profoundly bleak about walking into a dining hall and seeing my five blockmates seated together, each silently consuming 23-second-long reels while somebody’s untouched (and slightly uncooked?) chicken thigh cools on the tray in front of them. We are surrounded by the most interesting and fascinating minds of our time, and yet, given 14 seconds of conversation, everyone immediately checks for a new GCal notification.

Maybe we do need the pouch. Maybe we need to recenter the friends we made along the way. But if Harvard really wants us to socialize, we could put some of the $59.6 billion endowment to use. Throw us into our dhalls armed with nothing but lukewarm coffee, our own personalities, and the dawning horror that the person across from us cannot be muted, swiped right, or watched at 2x speed. Within days, civilization would return to normalcy. People would gossip, situationships might flirt, and somebody, yes somebody, might even ask a follow-up question at the end of lecture.

Heck, if I still haven’t won you over on this wacky idea, just think about the possibilities that await us. We’ll have free rein to decorate our pouches however we please. Go ahead and grab a bedazzling gun or a handful of those stickers you’ve haphazardly thrown into your desk drawer. There’s truly no better icebreaker than a good show and tell. Embrace the cringe—these pouches aren’t that bad compared to the wallet lanyards millennials used to wear.

This is the way, or I fear that 6,600 Harvard students will simply continue to stare silently at the table. I’d like to see this experiment in action this semester. At Glowell, the Quad Formal, Grensdays. And, most of all, at Blue Bottle. May the most performative strongest soldiers survive.

Sincerely,

Your resident doomscroller