Graduates’ future not so bleak

Well, the kids are donning their gowns and tossing their tassels and mortaring their boards, so it must be time for our annual graduation speech:

As I stand before you today and gaze upon your promising faces, I cannot help but think that despite what everyone says, your future is not that bleak.

I mean, sure, it’s 2016, and you’ve reached this milestone in the midst of a lackluster economy and dysfunctional government, with a post-apocalyptic dystopia prophesied for whoever wins the presidency, and you’re facing a worldwide environmental catastrophe leading to a sixth extinction of most of the Earth’s species, and whatever’s happening back in the cradle of civilization that’s now the Middle East surely marks the End Times, but so what?

It could be worse. You so tastelessly could Facebook photo-bomb at a friend’s drunken soiree that it costs you your job and shames you suicidal, for example.

Speaking of social media, your generation must keep life in perspective, lest it drown in the meaningless trivia that continuously spews out of your smartphone like raw sewage.

You think your future sucks? You think your newsfeed proves your world’s coming to an end? Talk to someone who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, multiple riots, assassinations and disasters.

And remember before that, some lucky enough to reach 80 or older lived through the Civil War, World War I and a flu pandemic that had a death toll of 10 percent in some places and more than 20 percent in others.

Maybe the world is always coming to an end. Maybe we just always think it is.

Like yours, those previous generations knew no peace. And yet, despite the chaos, they still found peace of mind, sometimes.

Their minds spent time alone, because they had to. If they didn’t farm, they didn’t eat. If they didn’t work on their homes, the roof leaked and the floor rotted. If they needed to communicate with someone far away, they wrote letters or telegrams. Before radios and telephones, news from far away came by mail, Morse code and publication.

Peace and quiet weren’t synonymous, of course. Some labored with machinery so loud they couldn’t talk to coworkers right next to them. But the noise was literal. It was outside their heads, not within.

Lucky for you, extended periods of silent contemplation no longer are mandatory, but that blessing is life’s curse, today: You become slaves to a machine that you never leave parked in a barn or bolted to a factory floor. It’s a wireless device that follows you everywhere, demanding your attention, spinning threads of distraction.

It makes your universe the virtual reality of cyberspace, and your immediate reality a web of illusion.

Only you can free your mind, and set aside some time for gardening, or hiking or fishing or painting, or just sitting on a bank of sand, watching the river flow, until you regain perspective.

This is not to say all time online is wasted: Netflix has a short film I like, called “World of Tomorrow,” a crudely-drawn but insightful animation of a little girl’s dystopian future, from which her clone contacts her via phone to retrieve a cherished memory, and delivers this final message:

“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail, for all these things melt away and drift apart in the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.”

Now is the envy of all the dead.

Think about that, when the future looks bleak, again. If you have time.

This story was originally published May 15, 2016 at 7:11 PM with the headline "Graduates’ future not so bleak."