Commencement Speech: May 29-June 19, 2025
Pretend you’ve been given the honor of delivering the commencement address to a class of graduating high school or college seniors. Write part or all of your speech, giving them your best advice for the world ahead of them.
The Submissions:
by Anonymous Frau Redux
What is the best advice for the world that lays ahead of you?
When asked a similar question years ago, I answered, “keep your head down, your eyes open and ask for another helping.”
Keep your head down- be kind. Try to get along with people because you have no idea what challenges they may have.
Keep your eyes open- keep learning a life long exercise. There is so much we don’t know, yet! Take time to observe your world: appreciate the beauty, make an attempt to understand other people, and be alert for danger.
Ask for another helping- not just for great dinners or desserts! Put yourself out there to ask for help when needed. Don’t be afraid to take a chance and experience something new. It could be great fun or a life changing opportunity
by Captain Quillard
Good afternoon.
I’ve been asked by the university to speak to you today on this, your commencement and graduation from college, and attempt to deliver some sage advice as you embark on your futures in the real world. You should know that I have no actual credentials that would make me an expert on the real world, other than being a graduate of this fine institution and – undoubtedly more importantly – a donor to it. For these reasons and presumably exactly zero others, I will be your commencement speaker. Lucky you.
As I am not a Real World Expert, I’m afraid I have no foolproof advice to give. The best I can do is offer you a few tips and let you in on a few secrets about the world, all of which I have discovered by being someone alive in it for many years now. Take or leave any of this information as you may – it is by no means gospel, and you may not find all or any of it useful or germane to you, since all of us are different people. It is, however, all information I myself would have liked to have been privy to at your age – secrets and factoids and tips that could have saved me a lot of headaches and heartache if I’d only known then… and if I could only remember now.
To begin, I’d like to congratulate you all on your graduation. Completing a four-year degree is no small task, especially when you’re doing it during the four years of your life that are most surrounded by alcohol and drugs and sex and newfound freedom and newfound responsibility and coin-operated laundry and intramural sports and toga parties and late-night pizza and fraternity hazing and social protests and hacky-sacking and hundreds of other things to distract you from accomplishing that goal. You have all worked hard – some harder than others and some passing by smaller margins than others, but all of you put in a lot of effort to be here today, and that is to be commended. To those of you who, like me, prided yourself on getting straight As or are graduating with honors, today is your day to bask in your accomplishment and enjoy the attention and accolades that come with it. Soak it in. Take pictures with your mind of the smiles and handshakes and cheers. Beam with pride when they call your name along with the words “cum laude” and give you a special sash or tassel to wear. Enjoy the rewards bestowed upon you today for all your hard work, because when I say “today is your day,” I mean “today is your LAST day” to collect on your investment. This will never happen again. Real World Secret Number One is that, after today, no one will care that you were a good student. No one – and I mean no one – will ever care that you got straight As or graduated with honors. My sincere hope for you is that you worked and studied hard because it was important to YOU – intrinsically, personally, morally, or whatever – and not because you thought it would get you somewhere. Because after today, the payoff for your efforts is exactly nothing. Granted, I may be exaggerating only slightly because there are some rare exceptions. It’s possible, though unlikely, that your grades may help you land your first job – but ONLY your first job. Subsequent potential employers will not only ignore your grade point average, but also likely think less of you if you continue to include it on your resume, considering it evidence that you are not a serious and professional adult. Is it fair? Certainly not. But it’s reality, so enjoy the glory today while it lasts. In the real world, people rarely, if ever, care how much you learned and how well you learned it.
The good news is, there is Real World Secret Number Two: Learning and knowing things is cool and useful and actually part of a very short list of the only reasons to bother being alive. You may have encountered this already – and if you haven’t yet, you will: throughout your life, there will be people who will say things like, “Why did I have to learn Geometry? I have never once used the Pythagorean Theorem in the real world.” These people are idiots. What do they think they’re doing when they reason that it’s quicker for them to cut across the park on a diagonal than to walk down the sides of two streets? How do they think the support beams are keeping the roof from falling on their heads? I will concede that sometimes people say things like this to argue that there are other things we should be learning in schools, and that I agree that society could benefit from more art or music classes or high schools that teach how to do your taxes and balance your checkbook. But the premise is often that certain types of learning are useless or that in-depth studying of niche subjects makes you a weird nerd, or worse – boring. Don’t buy it, my fellow students. There are few things greater than learning, and there are no people I’d rather spend time with than those who have something interesting to say because they haven’t stopped educating themselves. Learning is exciting and fun and almost always makes you a better person, so commit now to do it for the rest of your lives. Your grades won’t matter, but the habits that got you those grades will serve you for the rest of your life.
And while we’re talking about people thinking you’re a weird nerd, let me give you a couple Real Life Tips that I wish I’d had at your age and that I wish I was better at keeping in mind now: The first tip is to stop caring what others think of you. Or, at the very least, what those who think you’re weird think of you – sometimes there are people whose opinions you trust and value, and you may benefit somewhat from using what they think of you as a barometer for keeping yourself in check – but most of the time it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks of you. You are your own person, ultimately beholden only to yourself. Regardless of who we choose or collect as family and friends and life partners and the like, we all die alone and we really only have control over who WE are and what WE do. In a lot of ways, you’re all you’ve got. Spending your life trying to please others or fit in is almost always a fool’s errand and a waste of time you could be spending working on creating the best version of yourself and living your best one and only precious life. Which brings me to the second tip: Learn not only to love yourself, but also to really and truly LIKE yourself. Figure out how to become comfortable in your own skin and satisfied with who you are. This means not only identifying things about yourself you’d like to change and making those changes for the better, but also accepting and loving yourself the way you are now. Self-loathing is a natural state for many of us, and I still struggle with it. But I can’t begin to tell you how much I wish I could have all those years back when I wasted energy on feeling less-than and not good enough. I also can’t tell you how good it feels to accept yourself, how much confidence it brings out of you, and – not that it’s about this, but… -- how much more attractive you’ll become to others because of it. This comes more naturally to some of us than others and, yes, there are certainly a lot of obnoxious people out there who are far more confident than they should be. Don’t become those people. But do find a way to like who you are and know your own value and care less about what people think about you. The wonderful irony is that when you stop caring what people think, people end up thinking about you more and in a better light.
And a word on not becoming one of those obnoxious, over-confident, self-centered people: You will find there are a LOT of them in this world. Like, maybe even a majority. And it’s incredibly annoying, and I wish I could tell you that you’re not going to have to encounter them every day, but you are. The best you can do is not become one of them yourself. And I could give you dozens of tips on how to do that – how to not be selfish, how to care about others, how to be kind and thoughtful and reliable and honest and more. But really it all just boils down to one simple, easy-to-remember rule: Don’t be an asshole. That’s it. That’s… really the one rule for life, if you think about it. People want to know what our purpose is here on this planet and what is the meaning of life. Best I can figure it, that’s basically it. Put another way, as Kurt Vonnegut’s son said to him, “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” And whether you feel you’re here to help others or just get through this thing yourself, the best and really only rule you need to follow is “Don’t be an asshole.”
And, since we’ve mentioned assholes, and the propensity of them in the real world, I have another secret for you that may really bum you out. Perhaps you, like I, have been looking around the real world lately and feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. You may feel like you are drowning in all the awful news about terrible people and all the hurt and suffering and oppression they are inflicting on others. You may be astonished by their seemingly bottomless corruption and immorality and selfishness – their greed and lies and willingness to sell out everyone else for more power and money and attention for themselves. You may have taken to the streets to protest or written your congressperson or spent long nights talking with your compatriots about what we’re going to do to put an end to all this horror and bring peace and goodness back to the world. Well, my friends, I hope you are sitting down for Real World Secret Number Three: We’re not going to. That’s a tough pill to swallow, I know, because its side effects may include hopelessness and depression and despair and the general sense that life is meaningless. But it’s true nonetheless. A common phrase that we’ve all felt was important to repeat during these times is “This is not normal.” We know in our hearts that it is important to remind ourselves and others of this fact so we never become numb to all the atrocities being committed and we never allow it to be normalized enough that we feel it can’t be stopped. Hell, I even have that phrase hanging on my wall in a framed photo where I will see it every day. And it is an important phrase, and in many ways it is true, and it definitely is something we need to keep in mind so we always know that what’s going on is not okay. On the other hand, the reality is, in the big picture of things: this IS normal. Since the very first humans walked the earth, there have always been some that figured out they could make their own lives “better” by stomping on, using, enslaving, oppressing, lying to, stealing from, and otherwise abusing others. Human history is littered with kings and despots and dictators and oligarchs and all their little minions who’ve gone along for their own benefit. People’s rights have been taken from them systematically since the dawn of time. Systems and laws and hierarchies and other structures have been put in place specifically to keep most people down for the benefit of the few for millennia. Democracies and utopias have risen and fallen and been replaced with autocracies over and over, and the masses have always had to fight against the one-percenters just to preserve some semblance of their basic dignities and rights for as long as history has existed. Simply put, there always have been, and there always will be assholes. We will never eliminate them, we will never stop them from trying to take more than they deserve, we will never get to live the way we should be able to live, and it will go on and on like this until humans no longer exist (which, by the way, is coming much sooner than you think – but that’s another commencement speech).
But, here’s Real World Secret Number Four: We have to try anyway. The real reward for standing up and saying “no” is never going to be the change we want it to be. The real reward is the standing up and saying “no” itself. Despite the fact that we know going in that our protests and our letters and our conspiring for change is unlikely to change much of anything at all, we have two options: We can sit here and take it and be complicit in the atrocities, or we can stand up and say that we don’t accept them – that we don’t agree and won’t cosign and let them happen in our name. Some say the result is the same – nothing is changed. I say the result is vastly different when you know and they know that you refuse to just take it. Plus, occasionally it does change things – incrementally, temporarily, minimally, yes – but it is possible to slow the inevitable or to lessen its impact. We can be depressed, for instance, that people of color in this country aren’t treated a lot better today than they were 60 years ago. Or, we can recognize that things for them would likely be infinitely worse today were it not for the civil rights protests and marches and speeches and acts of disobedience. The goal cannot be to make everything better and stamp out assholes forever. The goal can only be to make it a little better for a little while, to create roadblocks to slow the assholes down and put limits on their depravity, and, ultimately, to be able to live with ourselves because we refused to accept what was shoved down our throats. That’s it, unfortunately. But fortunately, sometimes it’s enough.
The primary way that the assholes ensure they can keep being assholes without us stopping them is by convincing us that things have to be a certain way and there are no alternatives. They are, I might add, wildly successful at this. People crave structure and guardrails and rules, so they’re built to accept any they’re given and do what they’re told without question. This seems like a good time to present you with Real World Secret Number Five: It’s all fake. All of it. Virtually everything you take for granted as “the way things are” is all completely made up. From laws to norms to languages to religions to money to governments to beauty standards to capitalism to politics and beyond – all of it was invented and doesn’t actually exist. These things are only real to the extent we continue to go along with and participate in them. The minute we stop believing in them, they cease to exist. Some of them were created with good intentions and others were straight-up manipulation from the get-go. But, regardless of the original intention behind them, they have all been corrupted and used against us – to keep us in line, to control us, to make us buy things, to get us to agree to (or even endorse or vote for) our own oppression. It’s a lie. It’s only reality because someone said so, and enough of us continue to say, “okay.” This sounds like crazy, revolutionary, anarchist speak, I realize, and that’s not my intention. I’ve been a little rule-follower all my life, honestly. And sometimes having rules and guardrails is good or at least comforting. Realizing it’s all made up is scary, because what almost necessarily follows is chaos. Breaking down belief in the structures we’ve been taught our whole lives without having new structures in place leaves one spinning out of control with nothing to believe in, and that is terrifying. So, you don’t have to abandon all belief in these structures. You can still participate in them to whatever extent you like. The trick is to be AWARE of the reality that they’re essentially fake and not allow yourself to be blinded or controlled by them any more than you have to be.
The realization of or awakening to the knowledge that our structures are made up can be disorienting and leave us feeling like nothing matters. Fortunately, there is Real World Secret Number Six: Some things are real. There are a few things in this world that actually exist on their own without having to be made up. Some of them are the tangible ones you’d expect: science and math, for instance, are real. Independent of us as humans, they exist in repeatable, provable fashion as structures we can rely on. But there are other, intangible things that you might not expect to be real. I assure you that they very much are. Things like compassion, hunger, feelings and emotions in general, pleasure, pain, curiosity, knowledge, experience, and – most importantly – love. None of these can be tangibly seen, felt, proven in a lab, or otherwise verified. But none of these needed to be made up out of thin air to exist. They are all as real and important as anything else in our lives.
There are dozens of other tips and facts and things I’ve learned that I could impress upon you today, but I’m going to leave you with just one more. This may be the most important secret I can let you in on, given your position as graduates on the cusp of adulthood, ready to leave the fantasy world of childhood and school behind for the harsh real world. When we are children, we look up to our parents as gods – experts who know everything there is to know and can guide us through the many questions and problems we encounter as we grow. They were there from the moment we entered this world, ready to care and provide for us, and raise us to be adults ourselves. There doesn’t appear to be any limit placed on what they know about the world and how to navigate it. As we get older, we encounter more experts who possess all the knowledge about everything and can assist us and our uneducated brains as we are figuring things out. Teachers, doctors, police, elected officials, scientists, preachers, and other authority figures who certainly wouldn’t be in those positions if they didn’t know all there was to know about the world and how to live in it. It’s reassuring to know we can rely on these life experts to tell us how things work and show us the right way to do things. I must warn you: Real World Secret Number Seven is absolutely terrifying, but also perhaps a bit comforting. Here it is: NO ONE knows what they are doing. All those experts with their wisdom and knowledge? All those people in positions of authority we rely on to teach us and cure us and lead us and protect us? Your parents, who were entirely responsible for your survival and upbringing? They’re all just people. They’re all exactly like you – dumb idiots who don’t know shit about fuck and are every bit as confused and bewildered about the world as you are. No one, and I mean NO ONE, has the answers. We are – all of us – making all of this up as we go along. We’re building the plane while we’re flying it, hoping we haven’t made some critical error that will kill us all. I mean, sure, there are subject matter experts – people who have studied and studied one particular thing as much and for as long as they can, learning all they can learn and benefiting from the knowledge that others before them have learned about that thing. And that’s not nothing. Many people have become as well-versed as they can be about their little area of expertise so that we can have a modicum of faith in their ability to help us when we need a medical diagnosis or an analysis of history or a bridge built that won’t collapse when we drive on it. All of that is great and comforting and necessary. But when it comes to life – and even, to an extent, our areas of expertise – we’re all just making our best guesses, crossing our fingers, and hoping for the best. We do what we can to learn what we can and pass that information along to help others (or, to hoard it for ourselves if we’re assholes), but at the end of the day we don’t really know what we’re doing – any of us. You may think of yourself as an adult as you graduate, but you’re just kids. And your parents were just kids when they had you. They weren’t equipped with special powers or knowledge that told them how to raise you. They just did their best and worried they were screwing you up and hopefully didn’t realize that they were, in fact, screwing you up. It’s not their fault – every parent does it. There are no answers for parenting or teaching or leading or anything else in this world – not really. We’re ALL just kids. We’re all just figuring it out together. And, yes, that should scare the shit out of you. But it should also make you feel pretty good about things.
The thing is, graduates, life is full of contradictions and dichotomies. I’ve told you that all your studying doesn’t matter and that learning and knowledge are some of the only reasons to live. I’ve told you that you shouldn’t care if other people like you and that you should be a likeable person. I’ve told you that everything is made up and that some things are very real. I’ve told you that things don’t have to be this way and that things will always be this way. And all of this is true. Life, my friends, is truly, absolutely, completely terrible. And life is so, so incredibly wonderful. Go out and live it. Don’t take it too seriously. Love yourself and others. Like yourself, too. Never stop learning and trying to figure things out. Help others get through this thing, whatever it is. And please, for the love of god, don’t be an asshole.
Congratulations.
Next Week’s Assignment:
Find objects in your house that have interesting patterns or textures. Take photos of those patterns and use them (print and cut them out, assemble digitally, whatever) to create a collage, landscape, or other piece of art.