• Now this is the part of the commencement address where I am supposed to tell you that, in fact, adulthood isn't so bad and blah blah blah but, no! No! It IS so bad! If anything, it is worse that I could have ever imagined!
• ...and along the way, along the way you'll find yourself wondering, "Why am I doing this? Why am I doing ANY of this?" And this, in my experience, is where your Kenyon (College) education will come in very handy.
• ...you've been investigating what constitutes a fulfilling, successful human life. And I'd argue that actually IS adulthood. Like maybe adulthood isn't something you've spent your time at Kenyon College preparing for. Instead, maybe you've been doing it...
• You're probably familiar with the old line that 'a liberal arts education teaches people how to think,' but I think it mostly teaches you how to listen. In your classes and in your readings, you've been listening. You've listened to your professors and to your peers, but also to Tony Morse and Jane Austin and John Milton, as you altogether examine the big questions of our species: What do we owe ourselves? What do we owe others? What is the nature of the universe? And what is our role in it? How best must we alleviate the suffering within and without?
• You learned about these questions here, at Kenyon, but you won't leave them here. And while making your voice heard on those questions is vital, you've also learned here that your voice gets stronger the more you listen. And not just listening to loud voices but also to those that are hard to hear because they've been systemically silenced.
• I hope that listening will help inoculate you from the seductive lies of our time. The lie that strength and toughness are always assets, that selfishness is not just necessary but desirable, that the whole world benefits most when you act in your own, narrow self-interests. That seductive line is appealing because it allows us to go on doing what we would have been doing anyway. Because it imagines a world in which 'I am what I feel myself to be, the exact center of the universe.'
• But living for one's self, even very successfully, will do absolutely nothing to fill the gasping void inside of you. In my experience, that void gets filled not through strength, but through weakness. You must be weak before the world because love and listening weaken you. They make you vulnerable, they break you open. And it is only when you are weak that you can truly see and acknowledge and forgive and love the weakness in others.
• Weakness allows you to see other humans not as enemies to defeat, but as collaborators and co-creators. In the end, we're making humanness up together as we go along.
• ...all of these so called "horrors of adulthood" emerge from living in a world where you are inextricably connected to other people to whom you must learn to listen. And that turns out to be great news! And if you can remember that those conversations about grass length and the weather are actually conversations about how we're gonna get through and how we're gonna get through together, they become not just bearable but almost kind of transcendent.
• Over the next few days, you're gonna straggle out of this strange and wonderful place and enter a world where you will be, at least for a little while, manifestly weak. If you're lucky enough to have a job, it will likely involve fetching coffee for ungrateful bosses or entering data or writing press releases that no one reads. Some people will probably treat you as less than fully human, imagining you not to be the complex and multitudinous person you are, but instead as an easily replaceable card in the clock works of their organization. And all of that will be easier if you can see yourself not as the protagonist of your own heroic journey, but instead as a collaborator in a massive, sprawling human epic.
• 'You're about to be a nobody. And that's important because when you become a somebody, if you can remember what it was like to be a nobody, you won't be a jerk.'
• I can offer you no real advice on how to live a successful adult life, but I don't need to. The people you thought of during that minute of silence, they are who you wanna be when you grow up. They have been strong for you but also weak for you. They listen to you; they were irrationally, impossibly kind to you. It's not just that you wouldn't be here without them, you wouldn't BE without them."

- John Green