Carl Hiaasen - Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You’ll Never Hear

Going into Town

Cant We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

The Party, After You Left

What I Hate: From A to Z

Theories of Everything

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2018 by Carl Hiaasen

Illustrations copyright 2018 by Roz Chast

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933388

ISBN 9780525655015 (hardcover)

EBOOK ISBN 9780525655022

Cover design by Roz Chast

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For Quinn, soaring off to college

This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration.

Thats not what you need. You need a warning.

After an uncommonly long career observing and writing about misbehavior, I have one piece of advice as you launch yourselves from college: Assume the worst.

Based on the last six thousand years of human history, its the only sensible way to proceed. Lowering your expectations will inoculate you against serial disappointments. It will also set you up for heart-lifting surprises on those occasions when someone you meet turns out to be unexpectedly honorable, generous and selfless.

If I were actually standing at a podium, looking out at a sea of young hope-filled faces, Id begin with a raw appraisal of the real world: Its pretty fucked up.

It was fucked up when I graduated, too, but not this bad. Our vernacular contained no such terms as active shooter, ISIS-inspired or viral cat video.

Still, Id bet that even the brightest of you would sit there thinkingas past generations haveokay, its got to get better.

Im here to say: No, it doesnt.

And where did you get such a tender idea?

The day I got out of college, in 1974, a vainglorious paranoid was in the White House, shredding the U.S. Constitution for toilet paper. There was a futile and tragic overseas war, hatred and bloodshed in the Middle East, dissent and injustice on the streets of America.

Ring a bell?

The forces of indifference, incompetence and evilyup, it existsare thriving in the twenty-first century. No matter what good things you try to do, youre in for a slog.

Im not saying you shouldnt dream of making an impact. Just understand that the odds are stacked against you.

One key to meaningful achievement is disregarding the lame platitudes youll hear in real commencement speeches, group therapy and self-help podcasts:

1. Live each day as if its your last.

As wise and appealing as this might sound, its actually terrible advice. If you live every day as if its your last, you wont accomplish a damn thing. Youll soon run out of money, your car will get repossessed, youll be evicted from your apartment, and the person youre living with will dump you for somebody with a mid-level management job at BrandsMart.

Spending all your waking hours doing only what feels good is a viable life plan if youre a Labrador retriever, but for humans its a blueprint for unemployment, divorce and irrelevance.

Even if you love your job, theres no such thing as a carefree life. Most of you will one day awake in a cold sweat realizing those noisy little people in the bedroom down the hall totally depend on you. Theyre called children. Youll cherish them more than anything and worry about them forever, even when theyre all grown up and wiping the applesauce off your bib at the nursing home.

When Charles Darwin laid out his theory of evolution, he famously concluded that natural selection relies on the survival of the fittest. Well, the fittest of any advanced species survive mainly because they worry. The nervous caveman who insisted on sleeping near the campfire made it through the night alive. His carefree pal who strung up a hammock in the dark jungle got eaten by the saber-toothed tiger.

That, in a bloody nutshell, is the story of our gene pool.

2. If you set your mind to it, you can be anything you want to be.

Total bullshit. Nobody can be absolutely anything they want to beno matter how hard they wish, pray or try. I wanted to play major-league baseball like Willie Mays but, unfortunately, I couldnt run, catch or hit like Willie Mays. And I tried. Really hard. By eighth grade Id bagged the whole fantasy and moved on.

Self-delusion is no virtue. Anyone who tells you the skys the limit is blowing smoke up your ass. Thats not to say you cant achieve something remarkable and enduring. But doing that will be impossible if you fail to grasp your own strengths and weaknesses. In other words, work with what youve got.