If life’s easy, you’re doing it wrong
Dear Graduates, I do not pretend to wisdom, only to experience and an increasing awareness of the provisional nature of our existence. There is nothing I can tell you that is for certain except that you will live for a time and then you will die. You have only so long to enjoy this party, so you should not defer happiness too often or for too long.
That’s not what some of your parents and future employers would want me to tell you. They would prefer I offer funny stories and bland encouragement, an inspirational homily about a fresh world waiting to be conquered by your diligent energy and new ideas.
While we are sore in need of diligent energy and new ideas, the world has its own momentum and inertia. There are those with an interest in maintaining the status quo, even if, as some believe, we are rapidly depleting an exhausted planet. There are always those willing to take a win by running out the clock. There are many in my generation who are cynical about the future’s prospects but don’t expect to be around when the bill comes due. We will leave it to you or to your posterity. Sorry.
Compounding this, most of you are younger than most of us were at the same age, meaning you are less prepared to take up the obligations of adulthood. This is not your fault— there are economic and social reasons that adolescence has been extended. It was easier to get a job that paid a living wage a generation ago; it was easier to buy a house and establish yourself in a community. A lot of people were able to escape their college years without accumulating crushing debt. A lot of people were able to find rewarding work without the benefit of academic credentials.
It is genuinely ironic that while college degrees—or even graduate degrees—seem requisite for most decent jobs, there are forces in this country at war with the authority of expertise and the very concept of truth. America has always had an anti-intellectual streak, but knownothingism is enjoying a great vogue right now as some willfully ignore empirical evidence while positing the existence of “alternative facts.” Although there have always been those who would lie to conceal wrongdoing, justify selfishness or manipulate public opinion, recent years have seen the ascendance of a cult of wishfulness whose members are willing to dismiss anything that challenges their source-less assumptions as “fake news.”
And as our digital tools get better, it’s going to get worse for reality. Evidence can be manufactured, and it’s not hard to imagine a world where each of us might have a custom comfort hole in which to climb.
And when nothing is trustworthy, it’s tempting to trust nothing. It’s not hard to see how we’ve arrived at this nihilistic moment: We have simply lost faith that anything really matters.
So it is tempting to retreat to lives inside our devices. We can pick our villains and champions, we can construct elaborate notional worlds from pixels and engage each other as avatars and profile pics. The unreal has its appeal. It always has.
People have always sought release—it’s why we have books, movies, drugs and suicide. It all comes down to Hamlet’s query. “To be or not to be?” is a question we have to answer for ourselves.
Maybe not being is better. Maybe we’ll all find out.
I would suggest you be—that you actively search for joy and meaning in this diminished world. That you take it all in—all the roughness and awkwardness of the world, all the asymmetry. Feel the grit of it. Bump against one another, mill and grind. Drink your coffee black and take your whiskey neat, if you can handle them. Fail. Recover. Fail again. One day your place will find you. Know that you can learn to do a lot of things, but that aptitude is not the same as ability. That if it comes to you easily, you’re probably doing it wrong.
And understand that we’re all making it up as we go along, that all of us are haunted and driven by conviction and superstition. Please understand that the small still voice inside of you is not necessarily right, that it is the same instinct that forces the murder of innocents in service of some higher cause. Every terrorist has a conscience, and the most important question you will ever have to answer is: What if I’m wrong? For you often will be.
You will likely disappoint yourself sometimes and are certain to be disappointed in other people. Most of us are lazy. Most of us take the easy option whenever we can. Most of us are benign, but a significant number of us are hypocrites, liars and moral cowards. The most dangerous of us hate ourselves desperately.
Given the sort of world we have made, gentleness and civility is a big ask. But we ask it of you anyway, along with kindness and a measure of forgiveness. We leave you a flawed and broken earth, with problems compounded by neglect. Yet it is still beautiful and precious. It’s been in the family for eons.
Maybe you can clean it up, make a few repairs, keep it running until you can foist it off on the next generation. pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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