11–20 of 297 posts
I feel like I'm too thoroughly cynical and jaded to take the tropes in "graduation speeches" seriously. Bringing someone back in who graduated in a totally different time, to a totally different world, in a totally different competitive, political, and economic landscape, to ramble about what they did when they graduated seems kind of pointless. Is her (or anyone's) story from the 90s really useful for someone gradua…
I feel like I'm too thoroughly cynical and jaded to take the tropes in "graduation speeches" seriously. Bringing someone back in who graduated in a totally different time, to a totally different world, in a totally different competitive, political, and economic landscape, to ramble about what they did when they graduated seems kind of pointless. Is her (or anyone's) story from the 90s really useful for someone gradua…
I feel like I'm too thoroughly cynical and jaded to take the tropes in "graduation speeches" seriously. Bringing someone back in who graduated in a totally different time, to a totally different world, in a totally different competitive, political, and economic landscape, to ramble about what they did when they graduated seems kind of pointless. Is her (or anyone's) story from the 90s really useful for someone gradua…
Really? Not a single thing? Not "work hard," or "be curious," or "be willing to fail or be wrong?" Those aren't genetic qualities, they can be taught and they can be learned.
I don't know when you graduated but I've been working professionally for nearly 2 decades now and I heard the same thing when I graduated - about how it was so much easier just 5, 10, 15 years prior, how I was in for a real battle, how I had an insurmountable amount of debt given my earnings prospects. And yes it was hard but I survived - I could have made smarter decisions to make it easier, I could have made worse decisions and ended up a barista in my late 30s. On a systemic level it might be harder now, it might not be. But they will survive as all previous generations have and will continue to.
There seems to be a bimodal distribution in people 20-30 years post-college discussing today's graduates. It's either "these kids are so lazy noboDY wAntS To WorK ANYMore just have a firm handshake" nonsense, or "these children will be wage slaves forever and it is undeniably the fault of capitalism/AI/Musk/whatever boogeyman."
I think it was hard when I started out. I think it's probably a little harder now. That doesn't mean it's any more of a "dog eat dog capitalist slugfest" than it was 10, 20, 30 years prior.
I feel like I'm too thoroughly cynical and jaded to take the tropes in "graduation speeches" seriously. Bringing someone back in who graduated in a totally different time, to a totally different world, in a totally different competitive, political, and economic landscape, to ramble about what they did when they graduated seems kind of pointless. Is her (or anyone's) story from the 90s really useful for someone gradua…
"Don't be curmudgeonly." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What counts as being curmudgeonly? Here's one heuristic: if a comment is flying close to the planet "Everything is worse than it used to be," then it probably is.
There's also this one, btw: "Please don't fulminate." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Good speech. It makes me think of why the rich get richer though. More access to more types of people earlier and throughout one's life. The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world. It's not curation, it's not "the best". it's volume and contrasts. I debate my friends about private school. they have kids, I don't yet. Private school is actu…
Relative school quality (performance on standardized tests, admissions to fancy schools), and public/private are proxies for these more fundamental issues. Too many parents discount the value of (1) to zero, with the idea that they're "sacrificing themselves" "for their kids".
An example of one good reason to not send your kids to private school: Burning yourself out on a series of high-stress job to afford sending your middle-class kid to an upper-class private school will traumatize them. If not for their education/social experience at school, then for your lack of calming and positive influence on their emotional/relationship-forming lives.
I don't think it's necessarily "wrong" for some people to send their kids to a "narrow-lens" school, even if it's often wrong. It can be right for somebody else and wrong for you.
So, as an older adult, I think maybe we need to be teaching more responsibility to kids today rather than this Disney fantasy. If people just focus on trying to do the best they can, that’s good enough. And spend that extra time improving your home, volunteering, and working on your finances like people did in the mid-to-late 20th century.
I feel like I'm too thoroughly cynical and jaded to take the tropes in "graduation speeches" seriously. Bringing someone back in who graduated in a totally different time, to a totally different world, in a totally different competitive, political, and economic landscape, to ramble about what they did when they graduated seems kind of pointless. Is her (or anyone's) story from the 90s really useful for someone gradua…
This is the kind of comment that the newest HN guideline is designed to discourage: " Don't be curmudgeonly. " - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html What counts as being curmudgeonly? Here's one heuristic: if a comment is flying close to the planet "Everything is worse than it used to be," then it probably is. There's also this one, btw: " Please don't fulminate. " - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguid…
I changed my mind. The speech is great. New graduates should totally listen to it and follow it's extremely relevant advice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the kind of comment that the newest HN guideline is designed to discourage: " Don't be curmudgeonly. " - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html What counts as being curmudgeonly? Here's one heuristic: if a comment is flying close to the planet "Everything is worse than it used to be," then it probably is. There's also this one, btw: " Please don't fulminate. " - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguid…
Well, that one's news to me, thanks for pointing it out. Huh. I feel... mildly targeted, actually! We only want positive thoughts now, I guess. I changed my mind. The speech is great. New graduates should totally listen to it and follow it's extremely relevant advice.
Not so! Check out the next sentence: "Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm sorry you felt targeted and promise you it's nothing personal. It's that we're trying for curious conversation, which the rigid-and-generic sort of negativity annihilates. There's not much room for curious response when a comment insists that the world is nothing but a "dog eat dog slugfest".
Btw, I believe that the deeper problem is that it's hard to tell how one's comments are going to come across. Most people underestimate the negativity they're contributing by a good 10x or so, which leads to quite a skew in perception. That could explain, for example, why you felt like I must be telling you to only do happytalk.
Good speech. It makes me think of why the rich get richer though. More access to more types of people earlier and throughout one's life. The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world. It's not curation, it's not "the best". it's volume and contrasts. I debate my friends about private school. they have kids, I don't yet. Private school is actu…
I mostly agree with you, as a person who went to a middle-of-the-road public school. I will point out though, anecdotally, my spouse went to the highest tier of public school in our city. She has a good balance of "seeing the world for what it is" while also having an edge of being personally networked to a ton of folks who are rich, well-connected, and capable. I look at the friend groups I built when I was a kid, a…
There are many aspects of my low-income schooling I would not want to pass onto a child but there are also aspects of my partner's schooling that I wouldn't want to pass either. I don't really know what the answer is, but I feel like being at either end of the normal distribution of schools here isn't good.