Welcome to Disorientation

“Would you ask your mother to pass the butter, please?”

That was my father, sitting across from her at my college “celebration”. It was supposed to be a celebration for my graduation, but it had instead become an opportunity for me, my sister, my boyfriend, a family friend, and the exiled divorced father of one of my roommates to act as intermediaries just so my warring parents could eat a meal.

But it didn’t matter, because I already felt unworthy of being celebrated. In my years at Brown, an elite university full of high performers, I’d pretty much coasted by on the bare minimum of requirements. Now, my friends were graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude, or with special department honors. I hadn’t even written an honors thesis.

The only commencement address that would have helped would have been one that said, “You feel depressed and like a failure. In fact, it was hard to shower and get dressed this morning. Just try to get through today.”

The year before I graduated, Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich was a pioneer in that regard. In June of 1997, she wrote the iconic column “Wear Sunscreen,” which acknowledged many of the setbacks and ambiguities of life. There, she told us that that success was half-chance, it might be better to lack direction, and that with hope comes always a twinge of sadness.

It’s not what graduates hear today. An analysis of 90 commencement addresses confirms what most of us suspect: most speeches encourage graduates to go big or go home. 64 percent of speakers urged graduates to “give back,” “serve humanity,” or “make the world a better place.” 61 percent told them to “do the right thing,” using phrases like “do your duty,” “have integrity,” and “value higher order principles.” Over half the addresses encouraged the students to “expand their horizons” and seek challenges in their lives.”

I call B.S. We owe students the truth, and most importantly, we owe them the gift of listening to their very real fears and anxieties without letting our own anxieties or biases deliver pat answers.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed while delivering the commencement address at the University of Arizona last month. On the plus side, he acknowledged the real anxiety graduates feel about AI and the economy. Schmidt said, “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”

He acknowledged that their fears were “rational” and encouraged them to adapt and to shape how AI will be used in the future — rather than for that to shape them.

But he too resorted to pat answers, encouraging students to grab agency over the AI future. But the students weren’t buying it. They know they have little control.

“The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.” He was met with loud boos, and he should have been.

Many graduates face existential questions, because the economic reality for college graduates right now is tough. A recent New York Times piece by Noam Scheiber reported that from 1990 to 2018, it was almost unheard of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. That’s been the case for five straight years now. Gallup found that only 19 percent of college graduates think it’s a good time to find a quality job — down from over 70 percent in 2022. The white-collar job market is softening, and AI is only just beginning to eat into it.

It’s important to give back, aim high, and work to change the world. But today, ambitious and privileged young people on the path to college are raised with a narrative of achievement—a surround-sound, multi- faceted version — that no generation has experienced before. At the same time, anxiety and depression among college students have skyrocketed. Students face higher debt than ever before, so they have less wiggle room to mess up. Pressure to find the perfect mentor, most elite internship, build the strongest online brand, and manage to pay the bills means the calculus to stand out is more daunting and complex.

The advice they’re given on the day they’re launched in the world couldn’t be more irrelevant.

In honor of the graduation season, I asked Schmich what prompted her speech then, what her own graduation was like, and what she’d tell graduates today.

As it turns out, Schmich watched her own college graduation from the risers, because she’d neglected to turn in her senior project and couldn’t graduate.

But her advice to graduates wasn’t drawn from that day: ironically, she wrote it as she was coping with becoming middle-aged. “It was me coming out of a melancholy phase in my life and seeing the light again. It had a sense of having come through something. That’s what I call the ghost of the piece.”

Alexis Redding — developmental psychologist, Harvard professor, and editor of the new book Mental Health in College says it’s ok, even healthy, to feel anxious in college. And there’s a difference between feeling anxiety, fear, and even feelings of depression and being clinically anxious or depressed. Alexis says we’re collapsing two completely different things under the umbrella of “mental health crisis,” and the confusion is causing real harm.

One category is clinical: diagnosable conditions that need clinical care. Real, serious, not to be minimized. The other category is something different — the entirely normal experience of being in your late teens or early twenties, away from home, figuring out who you are, facing rejection, feeling lonely, not knowing what comes next. That’s not a disorder. That’s being human in a hard moment, and Redding says it’s an opening to a conversation. If someone tells you, “I feel anxious right now,” they may not be expressing that they have an anxiety disorder. Maybe they just need someone to talk to.

That’s certainly been true for me. While at my college graduation, I was out of sync with the day, but I hit my stride in my mid-thirties. When I was invited back to speak at Brown, I spoke to current students about how sad and unworthy I felt when I was in their shoes. And after, they came up to tell me it was such a relief to hear, and that no one ever told the truth to them. It’s true. Through all those years of achievement, how many times does an adult pull us aside and tell us the world might not be our oyster?

But we owe that to our students: the melancholy, the dispiriting, and the downright scary. And then we need to tell them, It will get better. You will get better.

When I read Schmich’s piece in 1997, I didn’t know why, but my favorite piece of advice was: “The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.” As it turned out, it was the one I really needed.

With feeling,
Morra