Welcome, Class of 2018!

It’s nice to see so many of you all dressed up and actually smiling. Thanks for coming. Even though high school is over, it’s great to finally break 60 percent attendance.

Just kidding. Quiet down. Can’t you take a joke? Believe me, pretty soon you’ll need a better sense of humor.

Some of you look pretty proud of yourselves. You’ve received awards, been accepted to colleges, and won scholarships. You’ve worked hard and played the game, with the future in mind.

Feel confident? Good. It can’t hurt.

In a few moments, I’ll be inviting each of you to accept your diplomas. Your hearts will swell with excitement as you wait your turns.

Are you imagining me beaming at you with the acceptance you have craved since freshman year? Maybe I’ll even give you a hug!

This is what will actually happen: When your turn arrives, I will mispronounce your name.

I won’t be just saying it a little bit wrong. I will be so far off that you freeze for a few seconds, unsure that I’m not calling someone else, someone born in a mysterious, faraway land.

And I won’t even glance your way as you walk uncertainly across the stage. I’ll already have moved on to the next graduate.

It feels like sophomore year all over again, you’ll think. Nothing I can do impresses these people!

But it doesn’t matter whether we’re impressed. Get over it. We are not in the business of affirmation.

All along, we have been diligently preparing you to get along in a world that cares little about individuals.

Just this morning, you received another graduation lesson. Instead of handing out the tickets to this swinging affair earlier in the week, we required you to come to the school today just to pick them up.

That’s because we settled all you seniors’ textbook debts just yesterday, on your last day of school. So if you didn’t pay for that book you misplaced — perhaps you forgot it existed because the teacher never taught a word from it — you had to pay for it on the spot while we were holding your tickets hostage.

And at the same time, we were diligently teaching you problem-solving: Today, you figured out how to get tickets in the hands of six relatives by 7 p.m.

You’re welcome!

Grandma was a little terrified when you asked her to meet you in the underground garage, wasn’t she? Uncle Joe was absolutely sure that the reason he had to scramble to get his ticket was not because of us, but because you screwed up, wasn’t he?

I wish I could grade you on your explanations. Alas.

And, of course, you’re not really getting your diploma tonight. Come by the school Monday for that, if you want it. All you’ll get tonight is a diploma folder.

We don’t give out diplomas at graduation because it’s too hard for us to give everybody the one with their correct actual name on it.

Why? A handful of your fellow seniors won’t make it here tonight. They might be home with a cold in the nose, or watching something interesting on YouTube. Whatever, that could get everyone just a little out of order, and we’d never notice, because, hey, we can’t tell the difference between most of you.

And truth be told, we don’t want to. Remember? We’re not preparing students to be recognized just for who they are. We’ve been teaching you to survive in the herd.

If you’re going to succeed, it’s going to be totally up to you. That, and the randomness of the universe.

That’s because we suspect that half of you, even upon earning a bachelor’s degree, won’t be getting jobs for a decade or so. Maybe ever.

Sorry.

You will instead be competing with millions of other people, young and old, for freelance and contract work. You’ll soon be well-versed in quarterly estimated taxes and invoicing. What fun! You’ll be paying for your own health insurance, and there will be no one to send a mileage reimbursement form to.

You’ve seen those annoying guys who hand out business cards at parties, telling uninterested people how much they can help them with their companies? That’s you in four years.

Remember how we were so bad at providing many of the forms you needed to succeed in the high school environment? Each of our presumed failures was actually a teachable moment. That’s because before you know it, everything in life will be entirely up to you — or people you pay to help you out.

Remember how you took tests with questions about unfamiliar information, derived from chapters you hadn’t studied yet? Those tests were actually written for students all over the country, not your class in particular. If there was something on there that you knew, you just got lucky.

Kept you on your toes, didn’t it?

This is an illustration of the Lesson of Software. You may have already found that like those tests, all of the software you will depend on for your entire lives is engineered for everybody, and so, it actually works for nobody.

No matter how well we tried to prepare you, you will soon find that the quickly changing world beyond school follows very few of the precepts you actually learned in school.

That’s why many of you will soon have to learn what it’s like to live on the margins of society.

You’ll find you get there quicker in a car.

Automobile ownership was a sign of success for your grandparents. For you, it’s more likely to be a harbinger of bankruptcy.

Even if you can afford a car, you can’t afford a garage to put it in. And you’ll have a very hard time finding a place to park when you get home late. Sometimes, even when you’re early. You will get parking tickets, and they’re expensive, especially when they come in bunches.

And they may. Some officers have no compunction about covering your entire windshield with handy mail-in envelopes under the cover of darkness of a single night.

So you may have to ponder whether to pay the tickets right away, or put some of them off for a couple of weeks, and buy food instead. Try to get them covered before the fines double!

If you don’t, you may discover things they call “impound lots.” These are usually in the most attractive parts of town, and they employ the nicest people.

If you still insist on getting a car, consider driving Lyft or Uber in the evenings. That way, not only will you make a little more money, but if you’re driving a car all night, you don’t have to park it.

Of course, Uber plans, in a few years, to let the cars putter around by themselves. So that’s just another place you won’t find work.

You’ll probably have roommates in college, and if you do, get used to that. You won’t be able to afford to live on your own after college graduation any more than you could while you were at school. Do the math.

Or ask someone else to do it. We weren’t big on math here, were we?

And if your roommate is your love interest, you might as well get married. You’ll need to do your best to hold on to them, because you can’t afford it if they move out in a huff with five months to go on the lease.

Are you thinking about working to change things politically to make it more possible for you to live with a modicum of security? That’s really charming and old-fashioned of you.

You may know that almost everywhere in the country, the winners of elections decide where the borders of the representative districts will be. So almost all the time, the same kind of people get elected who were elected the last time.

The best way to get what you want from them is to give them money for their campaigns. Unfortunately, you won’t have any money.

Those of you who get jobs — congratulations! But keep in mind that by 2022, many companies will be paying less than half of their employees’ health insurance. I’m not sure about this, but the trend ain’t toward better benefits, my babies.

I’m more sure about the following good news, however. As soon as you start making decent money, there will be hundreds of new graduates ready and willing to take your job for the same money you were paid your first year — or less.

But if you pick the right industries, of course, you may escape some of these risks.

Here’s one growth area: There should be a lot of call for business cards.

— Commencement address for 2018: The Class Least Expected to Succeed —-