Words of Wisdom For the Class of ‘25

      (From the class of a very long time ago)

      Dear soon-to-be college graduates,

      Thank you for having chosen me to be your commencement speaker even though it was probably because Chappell Roan, whoever that is, was not available. I also want to thank you, in advance, for not checking your texts during my talk.

      Although I am very grateful to be here today, and in fact I am grateful to be anywhere, I will not offer you simple platitudes like saying I am very grateful to be here today. Instead, I will offer you several more complicated platitudes that, I hope, will make you forget, if only briefly, that starting next month you will have to begin paying off your student loans with most of your beer money.

      I know you think things are tough out there, that the world and the country are a mess and that this is a terrible time to be leaving school and heading out into the great unknown.

      But, hey, you think you have it tough? Back in our day, we didn’t have an endless variety of craft beers. We had to make do with Schlitz and Rheingold and Pabst. Have you ever tasted a Schlitz?

      Our phones couldn’t come close to fitting in our pockets, and we had to dial them ourselves, going round and round, particularly if there were a lot of 9s involved. Television, you know, had just three stations, no Housewives franchises and endless episodes of I Love Lucy. Worse, the stations had to be changed manually, forcing us to get up occasionally. Plus, to communicate with people who lived far away, we had to write letters by hand, frequently in a painful cursive, and hitting send meant being forced to find a mailbox.

      Perhaps even worse, we had only one kind of Oreos and Fig Newtons never came raspberry-flavored but always tasted like figs.

      So, stop complaining. Remember, there are still great opportunities out there waiting for you. That’s why we call this commencement, in addition to the fact that if we called it “the end” you probably wouldn’t have come here today and would have gone sky diving instead.

     Remember, you are now free to do whatever you choose to do as long as you make sure to call your parents every Sunday evening and find out if you’re still on their health insurance. And don’t forget to call your grandparents, too—we get lonely sometimes.

      And here’s one last piece of advice: as you go forward with so much new-found freedom, I hope you will use it for good and not simply as a photo op for your Instagram. The world is out there waiting for you, so try to remember not to be late because you can’t pull yourself away from TikTok.