Transcript
0:00 Rice, welcome. Thank you, Mr. President. Now, before I start, some of you may not have graduated from college before and you may not know the etiquette, but it's customary when you come up to get your degree to give the president a little tip, 10 or 20 bucks or so, just to show he did a good job. It's also customary customary to give the commencement speaker a little something, no more than 15 or 20% of your annual tuition, though I do take credit cards and philosophy majors get a discount.
0:43 The money is not for me, it's going straight to the Wayne Graham for president campaign. this country has a yawning leadership gap that only Coach Graham can fill. Now, even if you don't give, I want you to know what a great honor it is for me to be here on this happy occasion. everyone around walking up today looked so incredibly happy. The parents are happy to have to produce such outstanding young men and women. The faculty is happy to have produced such outstanding graduates despite what the parents tried to do to them.
1:18 The administration is happy to have such outstanding alumni despite what the faculty tried to do to them. The students are happy to have turned out so well themselves despite what the blowhards in all these categories tried to do to them. Well, Rice class of 2011, I am the final blowhard. I'm the last gasbag between you and your degree. So, this is indeed a happy occasion. Now, over the past few years, we've learned a lot about happiness.
1:48 We've learned that the relationship between money and happiness is weak. Once you hit middle class, getting richer doesn't make you that much happier. The relationship between friendship and happiness is strong. Joining a club that meets just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. Getting married produces the same happiness gain as an extra $100,000 a year of income. The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends.
2:19 The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Now, some philosophers distinguish between four different kinds of happiness. The first kind is hedonism, indulging in the sensuous pleasures. It's fashionable to look down on this kind of happiness, but students, judging from your bleary and bloodshot eyes this morning, you do not look down on hedonism. And you're absolutely right to do so. I can tell you that every 50-year-old within the sound of my voice secretly wishes they had partied more in college.
2:55 The second type of happiness involves having money, beauty, and status. Now, it's an oddity of our culture that our most collective fantasies seem to revolve around this kind of happiness. If you look at the ads in the glossy magazines, they all celebrate this kind of status and beauty-oriented happiness. And I have an odd fascination with the people who live out these lifestyles, which you can see in rich resort communities and fancy suburbs across America. These people are often incredibly attractive and effortlessly slender.
3:26 When you look at your their legs, you realize they don't have they don't actually have thighs. They just have one elegant calf perched on top of the other. You see these incredibly attractive families and you realize they've achieved a genetic miracle. Their grandmothers all look like Gertrude Stein, but after marrying a succession of beautiful spouses, their granddaughters all look like Halle Berry. And sometimes you'll see these people dashing through airports carrying tote bags because when you have your own plane, you don't need luggage that actually closes.
3:58 You'll notice that it it's apparently become fashionable in the world of the super glamorous drove dogs a third as tall as the ceiling heights. And so, you'll see them wandering by with these gigantic hounds that look like furry velociraptors named after Jane Austen characters. The moms are often so fit from yoga, they actually weigh less than their own children. There they were in the delivery room cutting the umbilical cord themselves, flashing Mandarin flashcards at little things to get them ready for the college admissions process.
4:30 And the most amazing thing is that the dads don't get sick and die when they get old, they just take up surfing and extreme sports. After retirement, they're out on the snowboard slopes popping Cialis like breath mints. And by the time they're 90, they're sprinting up Mount Everest. By this time, they've shrunk down. They're like 90 lb of muscle and grit. They're covered entirely in spandex. They look like little iron raisinets zooming up the mountain. I don't know why our culture spends so much time celebrating this level happiness, but it does.
5:05 And you as Grace Universities as graduates of Rice University, I know will not be satisfied with this level. The third level has to do with friendship and love. I once in interviewed a man who spent his whole life studying happiness and he came back with this result. Happiness is love, full stop. Now, middle-aged guys like me are not good at talking about love and relationship. My wife says that me pretending to be an expert on emotion is like Gandhi pretending to be an expert on gluttony.
5:36 But the fact is the surest way to measure whether a person is happy and healthy is to ask how deeply is that person enmeshed in passionate commitments. You can be enmeshed with your family and friends. You can be enmeshed with your com- community and co-workers. You can be enmeshed with great poets and artists, but you have to be enmeshed. Happiness at this level is a group activity. It doesn't come from inside, it comes from outside. But most of us would say there's even a higher and rarer level of happiness.
6:08 It goes by many names, excellence, meaning, and fulfillment. And it involves doing many things that are painful, not pleasurable. It involves doing things that sometimes cost you your friends. And it involves achieving some large thing for the world. And I'd like to spend the remainder of my time describing two different routes to this kind of profound and fulfilling happiness. The first route to this kind of excellence was best described by a man named Clay Christensen in a fine commencement talk at Harvard University.
6:39 When Clay graduated from college, he decided that his most important immediate task was to find a purpose for his life. He was enrolled at a program at Oxford, but he took off an hour each day to study, to pray, and to think about his purpose. The program he was in was very demanding, but each evening, no matter what, he took off an hour to find his purpose. He calls that enterprise the single most useful thing he's ever done.
7:10 Since he defined his purpose, he's allocated his time and energy in order to serve it. He says that if you don't have a purpose, you're sailing without a guiding star, without a rudder. You'll just wander aimlessly. You'll find yourself spending too much time on things that give you an immediate sense of accomplishment, like completing some project at work, but you'll neglect the deeper challenges that take longer to realize, like raising honorable children. When Christensen describes his method, he sounds like the business strategist that he is.
7:44 First, identify a goal, then devise a strategy, then find the right metrics to measure your progress, and then execute your plan. I've been reading Christensen for years and recently had a chance to meet him. I found him immensely honorable and inspiring. And yet, I confess, I've never been able to follow his method. I was not able at age 20 or 25 to sit down and think and pray and research and find a purpose for my of us are able to achieve this hard task in this young age.
8:19 I don't believe most of us are able as we set off on the on our life to understand the circumstances in which our life will be lived. The world is too dynamic, unpredictable, and unknowable. Furthermore, I do not believe that as we set out to set out in life, we're able to understand ourselves. The human brain has 100 billion neurons and each of those neurons can have 10,000 or 15,000 connections. That mind-boggling complexity is the physical embodiment of the mind-boggling complexity that is ourselves.
8:53 I don't think we can see into the deepest wellsprings of our action in youth or even at any age. And finally, and I don't know if I can express this adequately, but I don't think we fully exist until our story is well underway. That is, I don't believe that we're people who then form relationships and set off in journeys through life. I think the journeys and the relationships come first, and our personhood emerges slowly over decades out of them.
9:21 So, I respect Christensen's route to fulfillment. He graduated from college and asked, "What is the purpose of my life? What do I want from life?" And then he oriented his life around the answers he came up with. But I suspect that many of us can't actually follow that path. And so, I'd like to describe a second route to excellence and fulfillment. In this route, we don't chart a life, we're summoned by life. We don't ask, "What do I want from life?"
9:49 Instead, we ask, "What does my life ask of me? What is life summoning me to do?" Now, I didn't make up that question. I found it in a very famous book by Victor Frankl called Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl grew up in Europe and as a young student he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Now, this is not obviously not the life he would have chosen for himself. But he found that his life presented him with certain problems he never would have experienced if he hadn't been imprisoned.
10:20 Life called on him to study human psychology in moments of extreme suffering. Life called on him to preserve his love of humanity in circumstances that made it extremely difficult. Life, he decided, means taking responsibility for the tasks and the problems that are put in front of us. As he wrote in that book, suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. Now, I hope and trust that none of you will be confronted with tasks as horrific as a concentration camp.
10:52 But tasks will arrive and according to Frankl's method, the question is, do you recognize the tasks that are thrust in front of you and are you willing to dive into them? To illustrate my point in more relevant terms, let me try to describe an experience that many of you are going to go through over the next few years. You are going to spend the next 10 years wandering around American society. People who graduated from college a generation ago usually did four things in rapid succession.
11:23 They got their degree, they found a job, they got married, and they bought a home. In 1960, the vast majority of college grads had done these three things these four things by age 30. Now, the situation is reversed. Now, most young college grads have not done these things by age 30. Today you get your degree, but if you're like most college grads, you will spend the next decade of your lives moving from city to city, school to school, career to career, and lifestyle to lifestyle.
11:56 While you're doing this, by the way, your parents will be going quietly insane. But you're right to spend your 20s engaged in this sort of odyssey because as because as you'll do it, you'll put yourself in the path of many problems problems and tasks you can't imagine today. Life will ask of you many things. For example, you'll probably fall in love. This won't be an abstract proposition. It will be a with a real life person with a name, a face, and unwanted odors and body hair.
12:28 You'll probably not even consciously choose to fall in love with this person. You'll love the love will just sort of well up inside you, and you'll want to confront this problem. Is this the person I want to marry? This is the most important decision you'll face in your life. If you have a great career and a bad marriage, you'll be miserable. If you have a great marriage and a bad career, you'll be joyful. I tell every college president I can get a hold of that they should compel every student to major in marriage.
12:58 Students should be compelled to take courses in the psychology of marriage, the literature of marriage, the neuroscience of marriage, the history of marriage. Nobody listens to me. So, in your 20s you'll have to assign yourself your own curriculum. You'll have to prepare yourself so you can live up to this enormous task. Life will ask a few other questions. Some of you will find yourself in a poorly managed office. Life will ask, can you lead and inspire people better than that jerk?
13:26 Some of you will have a relative who suffers from Alzheimer's. Life will ask, can you be one of those people helping to cure that disease? Some of you will find yourself in neighborhoods where people drop out of high school generation upon generation, and life will ask, can you help break this cycle of poverty? In other words, you'll find tasks all around. Sometimes the task will be thrown unexpectedly in your face. Sometimes they'll be tasks you never thought or imagined.
13:56 If you forgive a moment of autobiography, all my life I dreamed of working at magazines. I love writing long magazine articles. It's the sort of journalism I love best, and for many years I did that. But for several years ago I was offered a column at the New York Times. A column is not a magazine article. It's 800 words, and it's twice a week. Imagine you have a paper due in 3 days, and then imagine that's the rest of your life.
14:25 Now, my my first instinct was to turn down this job. But unexpectedly, it was the task life asked of me. The New York Times is incredible platform, and it's a great newspaper, and not to be egotistical, but I thought I could represent a center-right point of view that doesn't have many pundits on its side, and I thought I could add a calm voice to an overheated national debate. So, I took the job. Now, I find the job quite hard and quite stressful, and I don't enjoy it as much as I did writing for magazine articles.
14:56 But I'm glad I took up the task that life happened to throw in my place. My enjoyment is worse, but my satisfaction is better. Now, I feel bad about this little talk because I haven't given you much in the way of concrete practical advice. I could tell you that when you're thinking of marrying someone, one thing you should do is sneak up and startle them. The startle response is a very accurate predictor of their underlying temperament, which you want to know.
15:23 I could tell you that if you have trouble making up your mind, tell yourself you'll make up your mind on a subject by flipping a coin, but don't go by how the coin flip comes out. Go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails? That's what your inner mind is telling what you want to do. But that's all the practical advice I'll give you. So, this hasn't been a practical talk.
15:48 But I've tried to describe two ways of thinking about life. Clay Christensen had his way of organizing his life, and it worked out well for him, and it will probably work out well for some of you. Victor Frankl had his way of conceptualizing life, and it emphasizes that we're not primarily questioning life, we're questioned by life. We're summoned by concrete realities around us. And so, the message of the summoned life is that you don't need to panic if you don't know what you want to do with your life right now.
16:17 But you probably want to throw yourself into circumstances where the summons will come. It's probably a good idea to spend a lot of time asking, what do these circumstances ask me to do? What is needed in this place? And the crucial tests are, have you done enough reading and thinking so you're aware of the summons around you? Do you have the com- capacities to complete these tasks? Now, as graduates of a place like Rice, I suspect you've been prepared, and you do have these capacities.
16:48 But there's one final question it asks, which is, do you have the ability to throw yourself against the currents of our culture and recognize that you're not the center of your life, that the tasks and the summonses are at the center of your life, and that your happiness and your worth is a byproduct of how you engage in them? Most of us are egotistical and most of us are self-concerned most of the time, but it's nonetheless true that life comes to a point only when the self dissolves into some larger task and summons, and that the purpose of life is not to find yourself, but to lose yourself.
17:22 Thanks for your attention. Thank you, Mr. Brooks, for that inspiring, funny, memorable message, which I think will serve all of us, not just our graduating students.
17:56 As some of you may know, the student commencement speaker committee recommended that the university inaugurate an annual commencement award to honor a graduating student, undergraduate or graduate, whose academic or extracurricular work while at Rice University demonstrates the lifetime values and efforts of the named commencement speaker. This year's award is the 2011 David Brooks Commencement Award for Social Mobility.
18:26 And this morning we presented the award to Darren Arkero, a Weiss College graduating senior. Graduating with a double major in political science and the study of women, gender, and sexuality, as well as a minor in poverty, justice, and human capabilities, Darren has been deeply involved in the Houston community. He served as a summer intern with the Houston Area Women's Crisis Center Hotline, and executed a research project with Equality Texas to explore the implementation of a safe school initiatives designed to prevent violence and bullying.
19:09 Darren was also one of 25 students selected through a national competition to participate in the 2010 So Force Equality Rice, where he served as an ambassador for LGBT equality at college campuses across the United States. Now, please stand and join in the singing of Lord of All Being, the words of which are printed in your program.
19:46 Lord of all being, throned afar, thy glory