Matt Struckmeyer's Address to the Class of 2009
Dear Graduating Seniors,
Mankind’s relationship with pigs and composting goes back millennia. No, I’m not going to talk about pigs today.
I’m honored to address you today, having taught nearly all of you and a good chunk for two years in a row, and besides that, having gotten to know you in a variety of ways both inside and outside the classroom. For many of you as well, I’ve written letters of recommendation to colleges or assisted you with personal statements, and that too is an honor—a chance to speak from the heart about your strengths and potential, a chance to share what I find most special and unique about you. In the case of personal statements, it’s often a chance to learn about your inner life. And truly, yours is a class of exceptional individuals, filled with humor, resilience, quirkiness (that’s code for borderline insanity), charm, and love—though certainly not without its passions, turbulence, and even dark nesses.
And given the fondness that I feel for your class, I thought deeply about how to address you today, about what wisdom that I could impart to send you out into life at one of our culture’s great transitional periods. While contemplating various ideas, I very fortunately happened upon an article in a magazine that moved me deeply and touched very close to what I wished to impart to you. My initial idea for this speech was titled “Waging the Wrong Battles,” an attempt to talk about the fixed ideas, grudges, and bitterness that we sometimes hold on too much to our detriment. Filled with a sense of righteous entitlement at the way we’ve been slighted or ill-treated, we rage on and lash out, heedless of how much more productively this energy might be spent.
So about this article. It has to do with a remarkable experiment that was conducted at Harvard University starting in the late 1930’s. The authors of this study were psychologists and the object of their study was human beings. More specifically, they wished to find out what makes people happy and successful over a lifetime. To discover this, they undertook what’s known as a longitudinal study—that is, the systematic evaluation of a group of people over the course of their lifetimes. At regular intervals over the course of their lives, the study’s participants agreed to fill out questionnaires and to provide a whole host of physical and psychological data about themselves, everything from blood and urine samples, to questions such as, “have you ever considered killing yourself,” and “what is your biggest regret at this point in your life?” They endured batteries of physical tests and had parts of themselves measured that I’ll simply leave to your imagination.
The Grant Study, as this project was designated, being concerned with success and happiness, sought the most normal and well-adjusted test group that they could find, those 19 year old sophomores who appeared to have the fewest problems—those who could “paddle their own canoe,” in the words of the study’s founder. They looked for those who were confident, cheerful, and outgoing, those who had complied records of both academic and social success. And Harvard being Harvard, though not nearly the hyper-selective institution that it is today, the participants came from well to do families that were well established in the successful rungs of American society. The founder of the study, a guy named Arlie Bock, “declared that medical research paid too much attention to sick people; that dividing the body up into symptoms and diseases—and viewing it through the lenses of a hundred micro-specialties—could never shed light on the urgent question of how, on the whole, to live well. The study would “attempt to analyze the forces that have produced normal young men.” He defined normal as “that combination of sentiments and physiological factors which in toto is commonly interpreted as successful living.”
But where this article intersects so well with my own interests, and how it’s germane to a group of people just starting out in life, is how this experiment played out over the decades. What’s so striking is that in case after case, the qualities that these young men possessed (and it was unfortunately just men, the times being what they were) as college sophomores had very little bearing on the success or happiness they experienced over a lifetime. “…it turned out that the lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.”
Here’s just one fact that stands out: of the study’s 270 participants, nearly a third experienced mental illness in the span of their lives. Many suffered through alcoholism, divorce, being fired from jobs, and one man only acknowledged that he was gay in his 70’s. A few surprises yielded by the study: regular exercise in college is a better predictor of late-life mental health than any other factor. For people who are shy and anxious at the end of adolescence and in early adulthood, this has no effect on their long-term success or happiness.
The point, obviously, is something we all understand as a kind of cliché—that people are a whole lot more messed up or at the very least complicated than they appear on the surface. Still, it’s a cliché that bears closer examination, especially at this moment in your lives, when you, as I did in your position, was filled with anxiety and regret as I watched my class’s shining, smiling luminaries cross the stage and receive award after award, deeply uncertain of my own chances for success and filled with a kind of foreboding.
Again, what emerges as the heart of the study might strike some of you as a cliché—the idea that attitude and emotional qualities matter a whole lot more in the long run than SAT scores, grades, and awards. In fact, the central insight of the study can be summed up with little story of two boys who race downstairs at Christmas time to open their stockings.
The first boy opens his to discover that his parents has placed there an expensive gold watch. But his reaction is one of anxiety and dismay: “Mommy, daddy this watch is so beautiful and delicate I’m afraid I’ll break it!” The second boy opens his stocking to find that his father has filled it with horse manure. To this he bursts out joyously and excitedly, “Daddy, daddy, Santa gave me a pony for Christmas, now all I have to do is find it!”
Now, let’s leave aside for a moment the question of why these parents might have filled one of their child’s stockings with feces. A cliché, right? When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. But this insight runs far deeper has much more resonance than it might superficially appear. It has to do with an insight that the leading curator of the study, a man named George Valliant, calls adaptations or defense mechanisms—these are the psychological tools we all deploy to deal with life’s inevitable ups and downs, its shocks and disappointments. There are the kind he deems “mature adaptations,” such as optimism and our ability to channel our drives into productive projects, and the corollary, “immature adaptations,” such as drug dependency and indulgence in fantasy, shying away from the real world. One of the most sinister is what psychologists call projection, the tendency to most harshly attack others for qualities that we know at some level are present in ourselves. This circles back to the point I was describing earlier, the ways we can harbor grudges and resentments towards family, school, and society, nurturing our anger and sense of loss.
Where this insight moves beyond the level of a cliché can be seen in another anecdote, this one from a book I happened to pick up in the library the other day. “Alive,” the book and the movie, tells the famous story of a rugby team from Uruguay, trapped at high altitude in the Andes after their plane crashes atop a glacier in bad weather. It’s a harrowing tale of incredible suffering and human endurance, all the more gripping because it happens to be true. The group is slowly starving, subsisting upon the bodies of their fellow travelers who died in the initial crash, and one day two of the boys are fiddling with a transistor radio they’ve managed to construct only to hear an announcer state that the search for the plane has been deemed futile and called off. It’s hard to imagine the despair that this news strikes in the hearts of the boys, having pinned virtually all their hope on the idea that rescue was just around the corner. The two debate whether to share this dismal information with the others knowing the effect it will have, but they conclude that it is their only option. Upon entering the battered fuselage one of the boys declares, “Good news, everybody! We’ve been listening to the radio and the search has been called off!” There are gasps and cries of horror, looks of stunned disbelief, and one of the listeners bitterly retorts, “Why the hell is that good news?” “Because,” says the first boy, “it means that now we can get busy rescuing ourselves.”
And that is indeed what happens: two of the boys hike over some fifty miles of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, with virtually no equipment and living off a small sack of meat that they’ve stripped from their teammates’ carcasses. It’s an incredible story of human courage and resilience, obviously, but what’s most remarkable to me is what it reveals about human psychology and the hidden forces that allow some people to deal much more successfully with adversity than others.
Like some of the people in the Grant Study and some of the Uruguayan rugby players, they were able to overcome a feeling of entitlement and “open themselves to the benign indifference of the universe,” to quote Albert Camus. In other words, they stopped viewing life as a series of things owed to them, entitled to them, and instead as a kind of play in which they were both director and actor. I’m veering a bit close to Sarah Tsai’s theme here—a very courageous speech by the way—but I’ll do my best to keep it on the up and up. No F-bombs I assure you.
It’s the feeling of entitlement that I think proves to be most destructive over a lifetime, and it’s the clinging to this sense that’s most likely to provoke what George Valliant called “immature adaptations.” Unfortunately, we live in a cultural moment that very readily disposes us to the idea of what we are owed—life in the early 21st century of a rich country like the United States has developed pretty much of a prescription for how a successful person is supposed to live and what he is supposed to get. By following this prescribed path, our society seems to say, we are certain to receive certain rewards. Think about it: we enter a highly regimented system of education not long after we learn to walk, one that shapes virtually every aspect of our activities and aspirations. In other words, we define success entirely in terms of what this system sanctions as success: making the team, making good grades, scoring well on the SAT, getting chosen to speak at graduation ceremonies…
But the most insidious aspect of this culturally prescribed path is that it has shielded us from our existential responsibilities, it has hidden from us from the ever present possibility of misfortune and death, realities that were ever at hand for most of our human ancestors. This prescribed path has an anesthetizing effect, numbing us to the awareness of just how truly free we are. Our society is so glib in its use of the word freedom, using it as a substitute for everything that’s good, but there’s a terrifying aspect to it as the existentialists have reminded us. Being free is another way of saying that we are fully responsible for ourselves.
And so now I will try to draw these someone divergent strands into reasonable coherence. My message to you today is to be most wary of this culturally defined path to success, even as you accept many of its challenges as worthy. Be ever aware and open to the possibility of your own misfortune, disability, and even death. The Romans captured this sentiment in the phrase “memento mori,” but it was they too who gave us its corollary, “Carpe Diem”—seize the day. And the essence of putting this phrase into useful service is through the relentless optimism displayed by certain members of the Grant Study and doubtlessly by certain members of the Uruguayan rugby team. It is to possess a constant mindfulness that our families, our society, and indeed the universe owes us nothing. By remembering this we can let go of our debilitating grudges and the indignation that proves so useless over a lifetime. But judging by the remarks you made at Senior Chapel, it’s clear that many of you understand this already. My wife and I were deeply moved by the love and wisdom that you memorably expressed, and I can assure you neither she nor I will forget this class. Thank you again and god bless you all.
