Let’s see if I can bring down the
mood.
I want everyone graduating to pay close
attention. I’m extremely intrigued by your prospective
futures, and if you could do one thing, it is to focus in on how you
feel and think as the years pile on quicker than you thought they
would. I’m asking this because of how many “old people” I hate.
I’m asking so that maybe I can do two things; either figure out why
so many clichés exist about life, “I gave up on trying to save the
world,” “it’ll be over before you know it,” “that’s just
how such and such works” and/or devise what it takes to escape
those clichés.
You see, fundamentally, I’m worried.
I’m bugged that you’ll end up saying things like the rest of
society or feeling as lonely or complacent as the millions of
match.com members. I lucked out in my cynicism and hated college and
what it stood for two weeks in. This whole “real world” thing has
had too much of my commentary and scorn, so graduation for me was
just another day. I already expected the worst and low and behold, it
can get even worse than my approximations. I think you’re all
generally more optimistic about life than I am, and if you go from
higher than where I get, to as low as I can go, that’s unsettling.
But, thus is my theory for many if not
most dispositions. “I tried, I thought, I hoped, I prayed, I
changed, and then it all went to shit.” After a while it’s really
easy to want to find a rut. The idea of “settling down” is
appealing, not for its truth about your nature, but for the prospect
of even the semblance of stability. Or maybe it’s in climbing the
ranks of a job; I’m all for loving what you do, I think it’s very
easy to forget all the other things you love to do and sometimes easy
to start hating what you love to do without even realizing it till
things get hairy.
Now, you’re my friends because
overwhelmingly you don’t tend to act or think like how I conceive
of most people. BUT, you are not immune. I certainly wasn’t and I
realize how hard you have to work and how deliberate you have to
think in order to avoid “life as we know it” or “life as it is”
and keep with “life that I want.” And at least for me, it’s
what I hope for you, it just takes so much more time and practice
than I think we as a society are even used to. We certainly don’t
teach it in school and it’s not what we’re celebrating at
commencements.
I know regardless of how things turn
out, you’ll survive. It’s hopefully about more than merely
surviving and that’s what I wish to keep working at. If/when the
world our actual old people created goes to shit or has set us up to
live a quarter of the American Dream as it was sold, I’m all for
trying to work on something different. Be it a different kind of
network or family or work structure or modes of thought or whatever
to escape the “comfortable” ruts people find themselves in
avoiding having to think about things too much.
Alone, you may be just another college
kid with loans, maybe living back home, or maybe starting a job in
your field, yet practically an intern to all the scared broke people
who’ve been doing it 10 or 20 years longer than you. Just don’t
become a slave to that paradigm. And if you start to feel trapped or
isolated or bored, I hope you start to think about what can be done
together. I see people screwing things up because they feel empty.
They lost their ability to decide for themselves. They lost what it
means to care. They’ve settled. Please don’t get comfortable.
Don’t allow their excuses to become yours. Please don’t squeeze a
pebble’s size of happiness for all it’s worth because a bigger
rock is too heavy or you’re too tired. This is too important a
stage in your life to let it get stolen.
