31–40 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…
What would you tell the graduating students?
It’s a great speech, but I’ve listened to this “chase your dream” thing for decades. I took career and personality tests but nothing in them fit. I don’t fit. I’ve gotten seriously jaded and live with crippling mental health problems and constant stress because I feel like I failed to find my people and now I just hide from my people. So, as an older adult, I think maybe we need to be teaching more responsibility to…
But if you've spent your whole life being told by the whole world--even people you thought were really interesting and wanted to get to know--that you're "just too fucking weird," it lands more like, "Oh. More advice for other people."
Similarly, if you're a person who likes all kinds of things--but only for 6 weeks to 6 months and then becomes utterly bored of them--there is no stable group of "your people." There's just "these people, for now, I guess," and you hold them lightly because you know in a matter of months, when you don't share the passion for the one thing they're stably obsessed with, you won't have enough in common anymore for them to tolerate you.
I'm almost 40. I'm really at a decision point where I have to decide if I want to keep working on my underlying trauma wounds, in hopes that if I just work hard enough, I'll eventually break into the "fun kind of odd" category instead of "too fucking weird," and blend in enough to have "people," or whether I want to own that this is just how I am, and there's nothing to be done about it, so I should really do what I can to appreciate the fleeting tolerance of "people who don't know me very well yet" while it lasts, but invest most of my energy in trying to figure out if there's any way to be both happy and lonely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> We only want positive thoughts now, I guess. 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We only want positive thoughts now, I guess. 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…
OK. The tribe has spoken. No more gloom and doom. I suppose there are other message boards for that. I appreciate the intentional and purposeful moderation here, even if I sometimes strongly disagree with the intent behind it.
That was enjoyable, and I appreciated the overall message. A little bit trickier of a pitch to introverted people, maybe. One bit though I'm interested in chatting about: > The truth is there are thousands of different places you could go work, and you have to consider them all and figure out which is the best. But that sounds impossible, right? You only had to choose between 60 different majors, and now you have to…
Rarely can you “find your people” without letting other people go.
The unspoken truth in this article is that it’s just as important to be willing to let go of relationships that aren’t helping you grow.
Easier said than done.
Whether it’s the negative influence of a toxic friend, or the mediocre advice of an overbearing parent (who is just trying to keep you on the rails), other people rarely have your best interests in mind.
Losing the people who aren’t “your people” is (usually) a necessary step to finding the right people.
As someone who has “reinvented” myself more than once (mostly due to school/job transfers), it seems what wasn’t said is equally if not more important. Rarely can you “find your people” without letting other people go. The unspoken truth in this article is that it’s just as important to be willing to let go of relationships that aren’t helping you grow. Easier said than done. Whether it’s the negative influence of a…
For what it's worth, I teach my students not to listen to their parents, because while most parents want the best for their children, without doubt, their assumptions are typically outdated, and were probably already wrong when they were young.