Don’t work. Be hated. Love someone.

http://halfhalf.posterous.com/dont-work-be-hated-love-someone

This witty yet piercing commencement speech  is one of my favorite reads. It resonated deeply with me as I am about to graduate from college. I'd like to share it with you guys as I hope that not only new grads, but everyone else can benefit from it, too.

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Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.

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I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process”and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

 

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

 

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

 

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Comment by grellas on HN:

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"Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable."

 

The speaker draws a dichotomy between work and play, as he defines these terms, with work being things done under compulsion and play being things done based on desire (and especially passionate desire).

 

His theme is a clarion call to shape your life, and the way you make a living, around things you love to do and to avoid dying a slow death by simply doing a job that makes money - the point being that it makes no sense to pursue modest comforts at the cost of spending your life doing soul-deadening things you don't like doing just because they earn you a livelihood. That is what "average" people do, and it is a pit that college kids facing life all fresh and ready should by all means avoid.

 

A few comments on this:

 

(1). Hard work, even lousy forms of work, can be precisely the sort of thing that allows you to develop into someone who has the talent and character to be able to do the extraordinary things you might love. The prototypical person who has all the time and ability to pursue nothing but his passions, I would contend, is the spoiled heir, the person who has never had to work a day in his life in the way the speaker here defines work, i.e., as doing something that only a drudge or a drone would bother with. It is no secret that many persons of privilege of this type will wind up frittering away their lives with little focus or purpose and will never develop the character traits that would enable them to excel in life. They can pursue their "passions" all they like but, in the end, they stand a considerable risk of being spendthrifts, worthless heirs, or whatever other pejorative term captures what it means to waste one's life away in the name of pursuing passions without focus or purpose.

 

Work - hard work, even menial work - is exactly what helps shape most people to rise above the frittering stage and to make something of themselves. For me, as a young kid and through my early adult years, it meant preparing myself for life's challenges by doing a whole host of things that I was "compelled to do" as the speaker uses the term: (a) enduring the drudgery of many parts of the education system itself, (b) selling papers, delivering donuts, working in a cannery, washing dishes, busing tables, waiting tables, tending bar, running delivery routes for a pharmaceutical wholesaler (yes, I know where most every pharmacy is in the Bay Area), (c) learning Latin on my own to help fill a deficit in my vocabulary and grammatical skills, (d) doing scut work to help meet family obligations, (e) working as a slave in a large law firm doing endless round-the-clock tasks of the dreary kind that young attorneys employed by large law firms often do (and quite a few other things to boot). Eventually, all these things led me to a position where I developed the skill and talent to do what I loved, and to do it well. But there was no short-cut to getting there.

 

Work, pain, and adversity are an integral part of life and it is no loss - indeed, it is great gain - to spend some years doing things you don't necessarily love if they help shape your character in a strong way and if they help you develop skill sets that you can later apply in a more optimal way. It is called "growing up."

 

(2). What most young people lack is not passion or intelligence but wisdom. That is, they do not yet know at their stage in life how best to apply the skills, talents, and strengths that they know they possess.

 

They have a sense of what they want but insufficient life experiences to make right judgments about how best to proceed. In this sense, the old, dreary job - with all its limitations - is very often a good way to get out in the world and discover important things about yourself as you gradually grow and develop to face even more important challenges ahead (which, by the way, can consist of doing exciting things in the form of a job - not all jobs are dreary and many provide all the excitement and challenge one would expect even in a startup).

 

I would add that merely deciding to "play" (as the speaker uses the term) can be decidedly dangerous in this sense because it assumes, very often contrary to fact, that the goals you want to play with are really worth pursuing - of course, they may be and I am all for those who want to throw themselves headlong into what they love doing, but many young people will simply not be equipped to make the sort of good judgment at an early age that they could make later after they have had a few working years under their belt.

 

Wisdom combines intelligence with good practical judgments; to make good practical judgments, one needs to know life and not simply from the vantage point of a 22-year-old who normally has not yet developed to a fully mature stage.

 

(3). Many people throughout the world do not have the privilege of completing a college education and it simply cannot be a rule of life that "play" is the operative way of doing things.

 

Hardship and privation are everywhere in many large pockets of the world and people live life doing many things they wouldn't do if they had different circumstances. Often this takes the form of hard, manual labor, agricultural or otherwise. Can it be said that such a large segment of humanity is doing nothing ennobling but is merely spending life dying a slow death while living worthless lives because work is done of necessity? This to me comes off as exceedingly elitist. There is much in life that is precious and people everywhere share these things, whether they are forced to do things they don't want or not to earn a livelihood.

 

My parents were immigrants who grew up in conditions of squalor. They couldn't wait to come to America to have the chance to better themselves, and they did. But they did so through incredible hard work of the type that the speaker here denigrates. To this, I say to him, "get out of your bubble and get a broader perspective."

(4). All that said, I liked the punchy, colorful style with which the speaker presented his points and I can appreciate that the points made, and the manner of presentation, can cause young graduates to examine their premises and to think about what they really want to do with their lives.

 

No one with even a modicum of ambition really strives to be average. On that broad theme, the speaker's points resonated with me. By all means, strive to rise above the mediocre. I would just take issue with the idea that hard work of even the "deadening" type is not an important part of that process.