Hey kids,
Nobody has asked me to tell you this, and it's hidden in the pages of a newspaper where they tell me any of you are unlikely to look, but I've got some thoughts on this whole "the world's your oyster" thing.
I'm not the sort of person they ask to give commencement speeches. I don't have enough funny stories or wisdom, only time served and an increasing awareness of the finite nature of human existence. I'm not the one who will tell you you can be anything you want to be if you just close your eyes and wish hard enough.
But maybe I can give you some truth.
Whatever dreams you harbor, whatever potential you possess, the sobering verity is that you will all return from whence you came. You will live for a time and then you will die. You have only so long to enjoy this party, so you probably should not defer happiness too often or for too long. That's not what you want to hear; you'd prefer an inspirational homily about a fresh world just waiting to be conquered by your diligent energy and new ideas.
But the world has its own plans, its own momentum and inertia. And in general you guys are less prepared to take up your place in it than were your parents. It is not quite your fault adolescence has been extended and adulthood deferred, but in truth you are in many ways younger and more callow than the generations who fought the last century's global wars. Many of you still depend on your parents for support; many of you are saddled with financial obligations onerous enough to call into question the value of your degrees.
On top of that, in many ways it will be much harder for you to find and keep gainful employment, much less a "career" that offers some sort of satisfaction, than people of my generation did. Even if you are able to find a job with some correlation to your chosen field, the chances are you will not be well paid relative to what previous generations have earned. Many of you will have to change jobs at regular intervals. Most of you are not through with school--periodically you will have to retrain yourself to remain competitive in our global economy. Many of you will be required to relocate a number of times over the next decade or so. This is the way we live now. They call it the gig economy. And yeah, it kind of sucks for the ones competing for the gigs.
On the other hand, times have always seemed difficult to most people (you should have heard my cohort complain back in the day). Capitalism requires relatively cheap labor to grease its gears. You are going to have to be more resourceful and resilient than most members of my generation are. And you'll find it annoying that even though you manage to work harder, smarter, longer and more effectively than any previous generation, you will not be rewarded commensurately. Instead you'll be offered a lottery ticket or the illusion that you might be the special one--the Mark Zuckerberg, the Steph Curry, the Adele--to achieve escape velocity and blow up large.
That's what the American dream has become, something achieved through luck and freakish talent rather than hard work and following the rules. I don't mean to discourage you, but it's tough out there. And for most of you, to graduate is to find yourself suddenly unemployed.
On the other hand, there are some advantages to extended adolescence. It is better to find out the truth about yourself in your 20s than in your 40s. If you are going to make a horrible mistake with your life, you should probably go ahead and make it early while you still have time to recover from it, before you have convinced others to rely upon you. Before you have produced little copies of yourself.
Now is the time for you to do something rash and stupid. Don't wait until you've collected a family and a reputation in the community to do it. Most of us aren't monsters, and we aren't saints either. We make choices, which lead us to other choices, which sometimes take us into strange territories where we don't recognize any landmarks. We are as we act. Good people behave themselves.
I've got no answers for you, only good wishes. No advice other than to live hard, love well and try not to be a jerk. Godspeed, graduates. Good luck.
Last week, I wrote that the late Guy Clark "supplemented" his income by occasionally building guitars. Songwriter Shawn Camp, who worked with Clark and knew him well, tells me that while Clark did build guitars, he never sold them. He gave them away.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 05/29/2016