(On May 17, I was honored to speak to the graduating class of the College of Idaho, where I graduated myself in 1993, and the students were kind enough to sit there and listen. I’ve had a few requests for the text of the speech, so here it is, slightly edited. Twenty-one years ago, I gave the student graduation speech to my own class, called “The End Of The World As We Know It — And I Feel Fine.” As my brother pointed out, I basically gave the same speech again, only updated. But at least this time, I went from REM to Elvis Costello. I also managed to quote Douglas Adams, Jim Harrison, Flaubert, and Warren Ellis. The College has promised me a video of the speech, so when I get that, I’ll post it, mainly for the benefit of my mom and other relatives.)
Stress, as Douglas Adams once wrote, is recognized as a serious problem throughout the galaxy. I know you have a lot on your minds right now: you’re facing graduation, packing up all your stuff, dealing with your parents and families, and wondering when and if you’re going to get a job.
So to quote Douglas Adams again: don’t panic. You will find a job. The world is not going to end. I promise there will be a uplifting message and a moral before I’m done, and we’re all going to leave here feeling hopeful and ready for the future that’s out there waiting for all of us: you, me, everybody. I promise you: you are going to be excited for tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that come after that.
But first, we’re going to talk about the end of the world and zombies, since that’s what I do for a living.
In the twenty-one years since I last stood up here and talked to my graduating class, I have not seen a future that doesn’t involve at least one Apocalypse. It seems like every movie, every book, and every TV show includes at least one version of the end of the world.
Right now, we have our choice of Armageddons: the Zombie Apocalypse, where the dead walk and go on an all-protein diet; the Flupocalypse, where some unknown disease jumps the species barrier and we all discover firsthand what the Black Plague looked like in Europe; the Peak Oil Apocalypse, where we run out of gasoline and everyone has to cut their hair into mohawks and join Mad Max style biker gangs to survive; the Nuclear War Apocalypse, which, like many other fashions from the 1980s, is coming back into style now that Vladimir Putin is annexing Crimean real estate; the Genetically Modified Apocalypse, the Vampire Apocalypse; the Nanotech Apocalypse; and many more.
You can tell a lot about a culture by its stories, and it’s pretty clear that many of us are waiting for the end of the world.
This leads to a lot of otherwise smart people looking for ways to distract themselves. We’ve made billionaires of the people who put the equivalent of a junior high yearbook online, send naked pictures over phones, and let us play Angry Birds.
As Jim Harrison once wrote, when distraction is at the center of the world, we have to look very carefully at what we’re being distracted from. I learned here, a long time ago, that apocalypse is also the word for revelation. Our visions for the Apocalypse reveal a lot about our fears, but they also reveal our hopes.
When I was a kid, our future included cities on the moon, space hotels, and flying cars. Somehow, we stopped shooting for that. We settled. We got small. It’s even become a slogan: “If this is the future, where’s my jetpack?”
That’s because it’s easier to be scared of zombies than to build jetpacks. Because it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than build a better future.
When I look at zombie movies and disaster movies, I see all the myriad ways we’re rehearsing for the end of all things, I think we’re waiting for our whole culture to hit rock bottom. For there to be a definitive end, some explosion that will level the world down to its foundations, so we can finally start rebuilding things the way they are supposed to be.
All of these Apocalypses have the same message whether they know it or not: they are mourning the end of the world as we knew it. It is an admission of a failure of imagination. My generation and the ones before it are having trouble thinking of anything beyond what we knew. So we imagine the end of history.
But history’s not done with us yet.
We have all these prodigious fears out in front of us despite the fact that, in many ways, the world is the best it’s been since a group of primates stood up on the African Savannah. More people are literate than ever before in history. Billions of people have, in their pockets, a computer that connects them to a global network with access to every bit of knowledge ever recorded by humans. Since 1900, we have almost doubled to the human lifespan through medicine, sanitation, and the complete elimination of some diseases. Two hundred and fifty years ago, it was still okay to buy and sell human beings in this country, and a hundred years ago, it was still okay to murder them for having the wrong skin color. And just this week in Idaho, a brave judge once again upheld the simple idea that all men and women deserve the equal benefits of the law, despite the pressures of prejudice and bigotry.
Flaubert wrote that our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The world, according to the research of Steven Pinker, despite all appearances, is less violent than it has ever been, with fewer of us murdering each other or slaughtering ourselves wholesale in war.
Every day, in spite of our worst instincts and our basest selves, the world is getting better.
Admittedly, there are some things to be genuinely frightened about now. I’m not actually worried about a zombie outbreak in our lifetime, but the thought of global temperatures increasing by four degrees celsius genuinely keeps me up at night.
But we have to stop waiting for Armageddon to get us off the hook. If everything is doomed, then we are free from any responsibilities. But everything is not doomed. Our greatest fear is not that the world will end, but that it won’t, and that we will have to live with the consequences of our actions.
This means we can’t wait for the big revelation or the final battle. It’s like waiting for a heart attack before you finally start using your gym membership. By then, it’s too late.
This is where you come in. (Remember, I promised. Get ready. Here it comes.)
I believe there is a solution. I believe that we are capable of finding answers to any problem we create. That we have within us the capacity for the same kind of greatness that put human footprints on moon rock, that turned polio into the answer to a trivia question, that tamed lightning and used it to teach silicon to think.
Most of you belong to one of the first generations to live the majority of your lives in the 21st Century. You have in front of you an epic call to adventure. It’s time to come up with a future that’s worthy of us. I might not be able to see it clearly, but I’m betting one of you can.
And yes, I know, it’s a huge job. Look, our grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t know they were going to save the world when World War II hit. They were scared, too. But they found it in themselves to dream of a better future, despite the horrific death and destruction that they witnessed and endured.
I’m sure they were scared. They did it anyway.
Because the only thing we know for certain about the future is that we have to live there. We can be as scared of that as we want, but it’s inevitable. There is literally no alternative. So I choose to believe that the future is, as Warren Ellis once said, an inherently good thing, and we advance into it one tomorrow at a time.
The only choice we get is what kind of future we want to create. Zombies or jetpacks. It’s up to you.
This is where tomorrow begins. Right here. Right now.
It’s time to stop waiting for the end of the world, and start working to save it.
