The Good Life Center: Plush Seats, Hard Truths

Publius is the only joint opinion publication at Yale. Formerly the Yale Daily News Editorial Board, we have published articles on a range of topics, from course registration to housing shortages. We now publish on Substack.

Let's take a stroll through the Good Life Center. Passing through the tranquil hall, you spot a dimly lit napping area at one moment and a cart stocked with herbal teas the next. The walls are lined with bright HomeGoods-style art, and the cabinets are decked with jigsaw puzzles meant to soothe student anxiety. Finally, you think, a spot for relaxation. Where work is an afterthought and students can bond. Where chaos settles into calm.

Yet this picture is incomplete. Even in the so-called “Offline Oasis,” a room meant to promote connection with peers rather than technology, the average Tuesday afternoon sees students sat distances apart, hiding their faces behind MacBooks and ThinkPads. In another nook, sweaty CS majors toil away, slumped on sunken bean bags. An oversized set of Connect Four, naively placed in the center of a room, divides the space into Bass cubicles. 

According to the Yale Schwarzman Center’s website, the Good Life Center “encourages students to slow down and figure out just what wellness means for them, personally.” The people have spoken: wellness means working on your PSET on the floor on a sunny day. So, who’s to blame? 

Maybe it’s on the University. The Good Life Center entertains the fantasy that student mental health can be improved simply by changing the ambiance—swapping out “cold light” from harsh fluorescent tubes for “warm light” from thoughtfully selected, clinically approved LED bulbs. But soft lighting or fake plants alone can’t right what’s wrong. No matter how Pinterest-worthy it may be, the Good Life Center feels like an artificial solution—an aesthetic band-aid that the Yale administration has slapped onto a mental health crisis.

Perhaps this superficiality is intentional, a calculated attempt by the University to bat away deeper scrutiny of how it handles student mental health. It conveys an administration that cares, that provides students with ample space to unwind and seek refuge from the pressures of their coursework and extracurriculars. To the broader public of prospective students and doe-eyed visitors, the message is plain: the University has the issue of student mental health on lock. It seems no stroke of pure coincidence that the mountain of money poured into the Center happened to assume such a highly visible form. 

A more charitable explanation is that the University’s misguided approach stems from good intentions lacking sufficient foresight. Students lamented poor mental health at Yale. The administration responded with what they genuinely believed we needed: a space to decompress and disconnect. If this is the case, then their wellness project has only fallen short in the sense that it did not end up serving the role they envisioned. Despite grandiose hopes, the impact on mental health was unfortunately shallow. Of course, it would be reductive to suggest that the University’s approach to mental health is entirely superficial, given that the Center is but one part of a broader set of initiatives. Yet, the Center is perhaps emblematic of the University’s approach, providing resources and naively believing they–and they alone–will solve our mental health crisis.

Or maybe we’re to blame. Of course we’d like to think of the ever-churning gears of Yale work culture as powered by some broader force—something purely “institutional.” But might we, ourselves, be the  real engines of this academic toxicity?

After all, it is students, not administrators, who have converted the plush Good Life nooks into chambers of productivity. We choose to park ourselves for hours on comfortably padded seats, beside stacks of adult coloring books, and proceed to chip away at the impossibly long to-do lists we’ve created for ourselves. No Yale higher-up whispers in our ears the importance of achieving a near-perfect GPA or attaining that prestigious internship; these are attitudes which come from within. For many, this line of thought, this deep-seated drive and motivation, is what got them to Yale. It should not come as a surprise that this never-satisfied perfectionist slant does not miraculously vanish upon matriculation.

Culture is a sum of the people who live in it. There is an argument to be made that this epidemic of stress, never-ending and ubiquitous throughout campus, is a direct reflection of the Yale student’s mentality to work themself to the bone. Maybe we have the time that we claim to lack, but we fill it trying to catch up with that one friend who always seems to be working harder than us. Maybe in this respect, the Good Life Center, despite Laurie Santos’ best efforts, was doomed before its inception. It’s up to us to reckon with our culture, to grapple with our incessant need to compare ourselves and receive validation. Only then can the Good Life Center become more than just another Sterling reading room.

We asked the University for more mental health resources. They gave us a space with plush seating and colored pencils. A space which we’ve co-opted as yet another study spot to frequent. But we would be remiss to attribute blame solely to the University or to students themselves. The truth likely lies somewhere in between.

Though culpability remains blurry, what’s clear is that the issue runs deeper than we, or the administration, would like to admit. So, what next, Yale? Is it finally time to rip off the band-aid and face the damage that lies underneath?

This piece was written and voted on by the existing members of Publius at the time. These members are listed below:

Justin Crosby, Silliman ’25
Middleton MA

Hannah Figueroa Velázquez, Berkeley ’26
Portland, OR

Ami Gillon, Saybrook ’27
New York, NY

Adam Tufts, Berkeley ’26
Livermore, CA

Other writers of this article wish to remain anonymous.