Ladies, gentlemen, faculty, and graduates, I have been hired by your esteemed institution to tell you how fabulous your life will soon be if you work hard and dream big, but that, as the rest of us have already figured out, would be a lie. All your life adults have told you how special you are and how you can do anything you set your mind to, but sooner or later you'll discover the truth: that these people said those things because, like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the American Dream, it sounded pretty at the time.
They said that the world is your oyster- actually, that bit is partly true since both are cold and wet, acquired tastes that could result in illness or death if not properly prepared. People also like to say that college is a lot like life, and that is certainly true in as much as both are a colossal waste of time. You sit here before me about enter the "real world" with no real skills, a head-full of misguided ambitions, and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, each of you eagerly awaiting your chance to make your mark on the world. The good news is that you can stop holding your breath.
In a few years you will come to understand the utter pointlessness of your life and that everything you've ever done is just a means of killing time until your heart stops. Some methods are better than others, certainly, but they all achieve the same effect. To put it more bluntly, you are now standing in the world's longest line waiting to die, and the sooner you come to grips with that, the "happier" you will be.
Just look back at the stony, half-dead faces of your parents if you don't believe me. Are those the faces of fulfilled people? If they look happy at all it's because they expect you to move out next week, but we both know that's not happening any time soon.
Here's what you have to look forward to: work, boredom, marriage, boredom, perhaps children, more boredom, retirement, heaps more boredom, and eventually the long-overdue and somewhat anticlimactic finality of death. There are other exciting milestones, too, such as crippling debt, career failure, and the deaths of several dozen close friends and loved ones, but we're going to stick to the highlights this afternoon since time is limited.
From here, you're most likely headed off to the world of work. Sure, you've told your friends you're going planning to manage an Indonesian organic farming cooperative, but secretly you've got your heart set on selling your soul to the highest (or first) bidder with a 401-k plan and partial dental coverage.
No, you're destined for a cubicle farm, the corporate jungle. My advice? Kick somebody's ass on the very first day. Right in the middle of orientation pop off a left hook on the person sitting to your left. Otherwise, you'll spend the rest of your professional career tethered to some middle manager's out-turned trouser pocket, not a positive outcome unless you're into that sort of thing. No matter what, you'll end up being somebody's bitch, depending on how you choose to look at it.
In the interests of expediency, I will sum up the next half century of your working life as a presentation-friendly bullet point list:
* This isn't just a career, it's my life.
* This isn't just a job, it's my career.
* I ought to have been promoted by now.
* Why am I still working here?
* I ought to have retired by now.
* Why am I still working here?
* Early retirement? Forced early retirement?
* Hey, what happened to my investments?
* Honestly, that wasn't a stroke. I'm fine. Do you want to super-size that?
Within two weeks you will find yourselves clicking randomly at your computer terminals, staring unfocused at the screen and clinging fruitlessly to the vanishing image of yourself as a go-getter destined for great things.
I can see from all the hand-holding out there than many of you are planning extravagant weddings in the coming months. Most so-called experts encourage young men and women to tread very cautiously into marriage, but I can't see why. On a recent episode of Oprah, some Dr. Firstname recommended that young women ask their intended spouses a list of 275 questions (from her book, of course) to make sure both of them were really want to get married. It seems to me that the answer would almost always be 'no' since the person you're considering marrying just spent the last four hours tearing your ear off with 275 questions. Dr. Firstname said that it was OK to not ask all 275 questions at once, to break them up into three or four mini-inquisitions. Thank God for small miracles, I suppose.
My advice is to consider the obvious. The law of averages states that you probably won't get too many chances and, let's face it, your looks are fading by the hour, so rushing into marriage is probably best for all concerned.
Everyone will tell you that marriage is hard work, and they're not half right. Continually lying to the same person day after day order to avoid the hassle of repeatedly explaining the harmless but tedious truth can really take it out of you. This can be difficult at first, but after a few years the fire will go out, expectations will diminish to negligible levels, and you will finally have a chance at a moment's peace. When you aren't avoiding your spouse, you'll be ignoring them. Occasionally, when boredom utterly overtakes you, you will have awkward and unsatisfying sexual intercourse with this person. Thankfully, this sort of thing becomes less frequent as you get older.
So, if you get a chance to marry somebody you probably should do it because at a certain age unmarried people begin to draw unwelcome stares. People you don't even know will ask one another "what the hell is wrong with that guy?" and after a while you'll start to wonder yourself.
You can say to yourself that you'll deftly avoid these tedious compromises in your life, that you'll bravely set course for the road less travelled, but in time you'll come around because just as plain old water has the power to transform the landscape over the course of millennia, you will eventually succumb to the pressure of conformity if only as a means of getting your mother to shut her manipulative word hole.
More than anything, marriage helps you blend in, and as your primary goal in life morphs from "writing the next great American novel" to "not being bothered for the next five minutes" blending in becomes increasingly important.
Having children help with this as well. With all their precocious and occasionally malicious behavior they help distract attention from you, leaving you more time to sulk about what a horrible mess you've allowed yourself to become.
There are bookstores filled to brimming with parenting advice books and nearly all of them issue the same inaccurate and somewhat dangerous bunk. Like all good advice, the true secret of parenting boils down to a few simple sentences: discipline your children based on your own mood, and drink great quantities of hard liquor.
The most important thing is to keep them guessing. Stability and routine lead to boredom and boredom, as we all know, leads to white collar crime and embarrassing explanations at dinner parties. With that in mind, I recommend a rigorous program of alternating between random praise and unwarranted chiding.
Good parenting and bad parenting both lead to the same result: confusion, failure, and mutual resentment. So, there's really no point in wasting your time by talking to them all that much. There isn't much to say, anyway, since they haven't seen the same movies you have and are generally more interested in talking about their own painfully dull lives than yours.
Also, be sure to fill their heads with ridiculous ideas about how they can accomplish anything they can imagine, thus planting the seeds of schadenfreudian entertainment in years to come. In addition, this practice also ensures another generation of clients for people like me.
Oh, I appear to be running short on time here. As for the boredom parts in the middle of your life's timeline, I suppose you already know all about that after having sat under the baking sun in black nylon dresses for two hours. This fact, and four to five years of wading through books of facts you will never, ever refer to again has more than adequately apprised you of that subject.
And the death bit at the end is really, really dull- no matter how romantic Shakespeare and Jerry Bruckheimer make it sound. According to national statistics I was far too bored too actually look up, the number of people who die each year in kick-ass explosions worthy of a film adaptation is so small as to be statistically negligible. No profound words of wisdom, just lights out and no one even knows about it until the cleaning lady finds your body in two weeks time. Like I said, Dullsville.
For the sake of full disclosure I should note that I was paid a sum of $125 to recite these remarks today and that for a far cheaper rate I am available for life coaching sessions, corporate events, birthday parties, and bar mitzvahs.
I should also mention that my book "Maybe You Can't: Overcoming Failure and the Myth of Success" will be available for sale in the parking lot following the ceremony. By all means take your commemorative photos by the fountain and whatnot, but don't delay too long if you want a signed copy. I only have about two dozen books left in the trunk of my car, though I suppose if we ran out I could pop down to the local Kinko's and print a few more.
Thank you and, if you believe in that sort of thing and think it will make any difference, good luck.
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread
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