This week we learn that Cambridge students are engaging in the world of online ‘sugar daddies’ and ‘sugar babies’. While this is perhaps not a revelation for those of us who have been around in the Cambridge student press for longer than one cares to mention – Varsity reported on this back in 2013 – it is certainly worthwhile to remind ourselves every so often that in among the normal rush of lectures, essays, and supervisions, there are other students who are living very different lives.

This probably isn’t cause to start reevaluating all of your friends – not everyone is at it on their laptops when they’re pretending to write an essay – but it should be enough to give pause for thought.

New realisations about the nature of life in Cambridge are a constant source of interest; why else are we perennially intrigued by the minute differences between colleges? It’s why we’re drawn towards stories such as the discovery of a 100-year-old gyp room at Selwyn, and why we’re bound to have a quick virtual snoop around other people’s colleges now that some of them have opened their doors to the cameras of Google Street View. It’s all about breaking down the imagined barriers and illusions which perpetuate the many Cambridge ‘myths’. This is, of course, a constant source of concern for access teams across the university.

Here we find the fundamental problem with mythbusting – sometimes we end up wishing that we’d remained in blissful ignorance.

However, we are frequently told (for better or worse) that blissful ignorance is not an ethical option. How often do we read articles which tell us that ‘awareness’ is the solution to any number of problems? Exhausting though it may be, we have a certain duty to follow, and form opinions on, the latest controversies – see, for instance, what now seems to be an annual debate about race and diversity, which is currently hitting the headlines again in the wake of the Oscars nominations and Charlotte Rampling’s comments. The aura of showbiz glamour which surrounds her has taken a serious knock, along with her chances of picking up an Oscar.

This duty to rid ourselves of ‘naïve’ illusions is not just a question of intellectual rigour for its own sake, although at a university like Cambridge we may often feel that this is all we ever do.

Instead, the intellectual bursting of certain bubbles is indeed a duty. If we ever wish to consider ourselves responsible citizens now or in the years after we leave the sheltered courts and corridors of Cambridge, we have to view the world as it really is. Every so often, rose-tinted spectacles have to be unceremoniously sat on. While that may seem disorientating at first – who wants to think about what their friends get up to online anyway? – in the end the truth will out, and it will be briskly refreshing.

In a way, this is what the press is here to facilitate. The things we read retain (regardless of their content) a latent potential to shock, and this is one of the reasons why any of us pick up a paper to read the news. We certainly take more interest in the stories which surprise us, and yet it remains the duty of responsible journalists to strike the right balance; hunting for shocks devalues them. If we are to avoid descending into unfeeling and unhelpful cynicism, we have to both realise and retain a sense of the value of illusions, as we both clutch at them and wave them goodbye.