This may be your first college Commencement, but you probably know these addresses have a certain formula. The school asks a person who has achieved a certain level of career success to give you a speech telling you that career success is not important.
Then we’re supposed to give you a few minutes of completely garbage advice: Listen to your inner voice. Be true to yourself. Follow your passion. Your future is limitless. Take risks!
First, my generation gives you a mountain of debt; then we give you career-derailing guidelines that will prevent you from ever paying it off.
I’m here to tell you the truth. Don’t follow your passion! Follow the passion of the person next to you. It’s probably better.
I especially like all the Commencement addresses telling graduates how important it is to fail. These started a few years ago with a Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling and from these addresses we learn that failure is wonderful if you happen to be Steve Jobs or JK Rowling. For most people, failure just stinks. Try not to fail.
Today is a transition day in your lives. Up until now, your life has been station to station. There was always some next test to take or paper to write or place to apply to. After today there are no more stations. Nobody is assigning anything to you. You have to start assigning yourself. After today your focus shifts to the far horizon and the big ultimate questions. What’s your purpose here? What kind of life are you going to live?
The normal way to ask that question is: What do I want from life? I’m here to tell you that’s the wrong question. It’s too open ended. Your personal desires are too unformed and all over the place. If you just ask that question, you’ll probably just drift around, lost and scattered.
The right question to ask is, What does life ask of me? What do my specific circumstance ask that I do? Or to put it more specifically: What is the defining challenge facing my generation and what is my responsibility in meeting that challenge?
I would say the biggest crisis of today, the one you will all have a chance to address, is the crisis of connection, the crisis of solidarity. Like a lot of countries America is divided, distrustful, angry. The social fabric is in tatters.
Only 32 percent of Americans say they can trust the people around them. Only 8 percent of Americans say they have important conversations with their neighbors.
The suicide rate has risen by 30 percent since 1999, and suicide is a proxy for loneliness. The teenage suicide rate is up 70 percent, and the teenage suicide rises from pain and solitude. Mental health problems are skyrocketing. Depression rates are skyrocketing. The American lifespan is declining, in part because 72,000 Americans die of opioid addictions. Our politics are defined by bitterness and division. Social media is often cruel, addictive and empty. We are losing the common stories that used to unite us, the common pride in who we are. In 2003, 70 percent of Americans said they were proud to be American. Now only 54 percent of Americans say that and 34 percent of millennials.
We just don’t treat each other well. We don’t see each other deeply. So, I’d say your generation’s assignment is to take a society marked by separation and distrust and create a society marked by trusting relationship, thick connection and healthy community--and you have to do it at a moment when we are becoming the most diverse nation in the history of the world.
How are you going to do it? Well, obviously I have no idea. My generation’s job was to mess things up. It’s you guys who have to fix it.
But I do have some inklings.
The first is about the root cause of all this disconnection. We live in culture that is too individualistic when it should be more communal, in a culture that is too cognitive when it should be more emotional, in a culture that is too utilitarian when it should be more moral.
When you were about 17 we ran you through the college admissions process, which teaches that status and accomplishment are at the center of your life—that grades are more important than kindness.
Then we told you the lies of hyper-individualism. The first lie is that life is an individual journey, that the goal of life is individual happiness. The second lie is: I can make my own truth. Each individual person gets to have their own truth and their own facts. The third lie is: I can make myself happy. This is the lie of self-sufficiency. If I can just get one more promotion, lose fifteen pounds or get better at yoga. We tell this lie even though when you talk to people near the end of their lives they report that they were really happy when they defeated self-sufficiency, when they are in deep and interdependent relationship with other people, when they were least individualistic and most connected.
Then we tell you the lies of the meritocracy: Career success can make you feel fulfilled; you are what you accomplish; you’re not a soul to be saved, you’re a set of skills to be maximized; the people who are smarter and more accomplished are more valuable than other people.
We’ve taken individualism to the extreme and in so doing we’ve weakened the connections between people.
When you look at how these values have distorted our society, you realize that the first thing we need is a shift in culture. The revolution will be moral or it will be not at all.
Who’s going to lead this cultural revolution? Well, I spend a lot of time on college campuses and I see it happening. When I go to college campuses I see ten times more moral passion than I saw a decade ago. I see a generation that realizes that every action you take is ethical. Every action you take either lifts somebody else, or hurts somebody else. Every action either elevates the core piece of yourself or degrades the core piece of your self.
