Comment by jerf
5 hours ago
College students had 4+ years to learn about the real issues before the graduation ceremory, and the rest of their lives after it. Rubbing every problem in the world in their face at a graduation ceremony is just gauche.
To everything a time and a season. Not every second has to dedicated to "problems".
Totally agree, cut the kids a break and give them a pat on the back and tell them something inspiring! Try to remember what it was like to be in their shoes on that day.
Edit: I don’t mean “kids” in a condescending way, I just mean young people taking the first steps into adulthood and careers.
"Not every second has to dedicated to "problems"." I was a lot quicker to agree with this sentiment in prior decades where we had notionally fewer of them, the big ones seemed better understood, and the folks managing the levers of power at least managed the appearance of competence.
There has never been a commencement speech made when the speaker couldn't have spent the entire time speaking about problems. Ever. Not even one. It has always been possible to spin an hour of doom and gloom about the future, based on 100% real problems.
A commencement speech is not the time or place for that.
I'm not saying it has to be 100% upbeat each time, just that it is not the time or place for an enumeration of problems.
It won't even do any good. What are they supposed to do with this that they weren't already doing? It's not like the world was sunshine and rainbows for all of them up to this point and the commencement speech is the correct time to disabuse them of that notion. This isn't your one chance to reach them with news of doom. It's your one chance to send them off and maybe encourage them to fight the doom. It is appalling to miss out on that opportunity because you've got an axe to grind and don't understand that not every opportunity to grind it is appropriate. Actively depressing and discouraging them is almost certainly achieving the opposite of what even you want to achieve.
I think in this case the speaker was talking about a "solution" which the students perceived as a "problem"
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This will go over great at weddings and birthday parties!
We need to fight for a better world, but that requires that we're not burnt out by thinking about our problems 24/7. We need some fun and joy to make the fight worthwhile.
Like I wanna stand here and listen to a tech billionaire run through a list of shit he did to my generation.
I am a teen, so I want you to consider yourself in the shoes of us youngsters.
you grind for 4 years, you might have student debt or a substantial loss of family income as it was invested in your education (I am assuming 30k$)
Now the whole purpose of it was to educate you, now some people cheated their way through with AI or whatever in the education system.
So the whole thing ends up going to the job market and well the job market isn't doing good.
There are multiple (and I mean multiple) factors for the job market to not do good but its not a overexaggeration that people at the top who have influence might be more prone to AI psychosis (Read mitchell's tweet) and how they are all announcing that AI is the reason why you might not have jobs.
Then, you have these same people come to you on stage and say to integrate AI or use AI and this AI that AI.
What would you as a student do in this? Would you not feel angry, frustrated, would you not disagree and you all don't have a mic and can't cut off that speaker with words.
The only thing that you can do to show disagreement is to boo, it takes one kind soul's immense frustration to boo and then everybody would join, would you also not boo if that was the case, to show your disagreement
To finally have a voice because their boos had voice larger than many things which is why we are discussing it here and people are discussing it!
"The only thing that you can do to show disagreement is to boo,"
thats only if you ban water bottles at such speeches.
But at the same time, I cannot disrespect teens by lying to their faces.
I just graduated, my friends and I have realized that these older generations are just ladder pullers: they hate us. I’ve watched my classmates politics and outlook become more extreme over time. I don’t think I have any respect for older generations anymore, I was never this jaded before, but my classmates say more extreme stuff.
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Mate just because you spend more time staring at a screen wringing your hands doesn’t mean there’s notionally more problems
collage students had 4+ years to be gaslit, and redirected from what they were indepedently discovering, toward subservience.