Other people’s lives are fascinating. This simple fact explains so many apparently inexplicable things: the popularity of celebrity magazines and structured reality television, the lightening swift spread of college gossip, and where all those hours spent on Facebook actually went.

It was with this in mind that I set up Somebody Else’s Cambridge, a project in which I interview the people I come across in my day-to-day life. I ask them about their innermost thoughts and emotions and publish the results anonymously online. I don’t know quite what I was hoping to get out of this strange activity. But the results have surpassed my expectations.

In Cambridge particularly, it is incredibly easy to fall into the trap of believing that everybody around you has the perfect life. Everybody seems to be doing everything to an extremely high level, maintaining perfect relationships, and understanding every article that they read the first time around. It can feel like you are the only one who isn’t perpetually in control. The more people that I interview, the more I realise that this simply is not the case.

We all project a version of ourselves as we would like to be viewed, and it is often only under the veil of anonymity or with our very closest friends that we let this disguise fall. If you are feeling uncertain, like you are not good enough, struggling with a relationship or responsibility, I can tell you now that you are very much not alone.

It is not just the people who I interview: the Facebook page for the blog has been inundated with messages saying that the writer identifies with one post or another, that the person whom I have interviewed has expressed something that they have always thought, something they never knew anyone else was thinking, something they could never quite put into words.

There is something rather comforting about knowing that everybody else is thinking the same things that you are, despite the initial shock of realising that something you previously thought was unique to you is in fact as common a trait as the tendency to procrastinate.

My aim in setting up this project was to prove, more to myself than anyone else, that everybody’s life is interesting if you look at it for long enough. Think of how much has happened in your life, how many different emotions
you have felt, how many things you have seen.

Everybody you meet, whether they serve you coffee once, bore you in seminars on a weekly basis or become the love of your life, has the same vast history behind them. You may think that I am stating the obvious, but it
is something that never stops amazing me.

We all spend three years of our lives in this city, maybe you will spend more if you are doing one of those practical subjects that have always mystified me, yet each of us comes away with a completely different experience. You could easily pass three years on the rugby pitch, and never realise that the thriving theatre scene exists as anything beyond an occasional annoying flyer in your pidge. Likewise, you could devote your life to student politics and be only vaguely aware that some people “do the odd bit of rowing”.

The onset of finals forces us to look back at our lives here and wonder if we made the right choices, if perhaps we could have done more with what are allegedly the best years of our lives. This can be terrifying, but it can also be liberating. I find it fascinating to see people who have been given exactly the same opportunities as I have, but made different choices and hence live completely different lives.
I think that this above all is the source of our fascination with other people’s lives: the fact that we are all so different, yet at heart share startling similarities which occasionally burst through. I got my wish: everybody whom I have interviewed has been extraordinary.

But at the same time, they have been startlingly ordinary. I have found myself identifying with every single person whom I have interviewed. When it comes down to it, we all have far more in common that we would ever guess or be willing to admit.