Jonathan Haidt Gives 2022 University of New England Commencement Address

given what what president uh what president herbert said about about the values of une given what i've read about it uh i can hardly think of a university that i would rather have an honorary degree from as you'll see from my remarks there's an incredible match between what i've been studying what i think we need to do as a country and what you've been doing here at une the only thing that gives me pause is how am i going to get that thing home on the plane i didn't realize that i was going to get this big glass thing nobody warned me about that but i'm i'm honored to have it i'll get it home somehow okay so i graduated from college in 1985 and it was i graduated into a world that was prosperous and fairly stable and fairly boring compared to other times i looked back at people who graduated 10 or 15 years before me and it was such an exciting time to be in college and protests and revolution and war and new ideas in the in the 60s and 70s and i felt i graduated to a very boring time you don't have that problem you're graduating into a time of um war and looming recession uh and extraordinary protest and change and extraordinary internal conflict and fragmentation that's what i've been writing about in in recent years now you're not the first generation to graduate into interesting and difficult times i think those who graduated in the late 1960s and the late 1930s um had a similar kind of world to go into but you are graduating with a particular disadvantage that no previous generation had which is that your generation for those of you born especially after 1995 your generation was vastly overprotected and then given social media in middle school and the combination of those two things i believe is the major reason why rates of depression anxiety self-harm and suicide are up by between 50 and 100 percent just since 2010. something is going very wrong with many people in your generation in gen z and of course there's huge individual variation i'm not saying this is true of any one of you but when we look at the statistics across time something went really really wrong in 2012 and ever since then all the rates are are skyrocketing now i can i can show you just how radically your childhood is different from any previous human childhood with this little demonstration i've never tried in such a big setting but let's see how it goes i'm going to ask each of you the age at which you were let out what i mean by that is at what age how old were you when you could walk out the door by mom and dad you meet a friend you go to a park you go to a candy store you're riding your butt no adult supervision at what age could you do that don't say anything yet your choices should be either 6 8 10 or 12. six if it was like first grade roughly first or second grade you would say six if it wasn't until fifth grade you would say ten so six eight ten if it was until around seventh grade that you were let out no supervision do what you want then you should say 12. okay so think of your number 6 8 10 or 12 which is the closest to the age and we're going to have you answer in three groups so first let's let's take gen x and older that is if you were born in 1981 or before please raise your hand high right now gen x and older okay so it's you know the parents primarily in the stands and a few of us and a few of the students okay so just you what i'm going to do is i'm going to sweep my finger around like this and when i point to your section i want you to call out really loud call out your number 6 8 10 or 12. okay let's let's do it so call that real loud [Applause] okay so it's almost all six and some eights okay so that was the norm uh that was the norm certainly for my generation and we grew up during a huge crime wave it was actually quite dangerous in the sense that there was a lot of street crime so the the norm and this was the norm in human societies all around the world by age six to eight kids are given responsibility they're given autonomy and you learn how to use that autonomy you learn how to how to protect yourself you learn how to navigate the world okay now let's go for the millennial generation that is if you were born between 1982 and 1995 you're considered a millennial raise your hand high right now if you're a millennial okay so it's a lot of the graduate students a lot of the friends uh millennials in the stands siblings things okay so mostly the grad students all right so what's your number okay i'm going to sweep my finger you yell it out what's your number [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay so the millennials are in the middle we get a cup we got some sixes we get some eights and tens the millennials of the transitional generation most millennials especially the older millennials were given some freedom to practice maturity to practice dealing with conflicts for themselves now let's talk about gen z so if you were born in 1996 or later please raise your hand high right now okay it's almost all the undergrads and some people in the stands okay what is your number now listen closely [Applause] okay so that was kind of a mess but i think what i heard was mostly 10s and 12s right is that right 10 or 12 that's the norm all over the country it's true in canada it's true in britain as well something happened the crime rate plummeted in the 90s things got really safe but we all freaked out about child abduction and we've and we thought you'll get hit by cars every previous generation learned how to cross the street and yours was not allowed to until you're 12. so we did this we did this for your benefit we were trying to protect you and we messed up we messed up because a normal human childhood requires as as president herbert was saying challenge exposure conflict you have to have all those things you have to have huge amounts of them and this i believe is the major reason along with early exposure to social media that your generation has been weakened your generation is weaker and more fragile than previous generations now this is not your fault i'm not trying to insult you i'm trying to call attention to the fact that you still have a lot of growing to do and that started here at university of new england had you gone to another school you would have been protected from any stress from any bad ideas you would have been protected all the way through and you'd have even more growing to do so you have a head start because you came here rather than other places i cannot tell you how rare what president herbert was talking about what's been done at uni i cannot tell you how rare that is in the united states since about 2014. we used to do things like that we stopped around 2015 2016 at most schools now uh i'm here not just to make you feel bad or shocked or inadequate i'm here to actually tell you what you can do about it how can you keep growing how can you overcome the obstacles that your caring parents put in your way so so i teach a course at nyu called work wisdom and happiness i teach in the business school it's a course for mba students um who you know they're mostly in their late twenties um they've been working really hard and it's like how do you flourish like you know accounting and strategy but how do you flourish that's what the course is about and i'm gonna give you the seven-minute version um of the course uh well let's see let's see how it goes um so the course i've restructured it recently around the theme of smart of stronger smarter more sociable if you can make yourself stronger smarter and more sociable then you will be more successful at work and in relationships in love and if you are more successful at work and in your relationships then you will be happier that is guaranteed so how do you how do you do that how do you get stronger smarter and more sociable um well ancient wisdom and modern psychology has been consistent in its advice for thousands of years if you want to get stronger the key idea is called anti-fragility think about it a wine glass is fragile so we don't let kids play with a wine glass because they'll drop and it breaks we give them sippy cups we give them plastic plastic is not fragile it's resilient if a kid drops a plastic cup it doesn't break but it doesn't get better right there's a there are a few things in the world that get better when you drop them that have to get dropped repeatedly in order to unfold in order to develop in order to get strong we've all learned about how the immune system works if you protect your kid's immune system no dirt no germs no bacteria you it because the immune system is anti-fragile the immune system requires threats and challenges and vaccines to trick it to get stronger well human beings are anti-fragile and if we protect human beings from adversity risk teasing threats the fear of getting lost if we protect them they don't get to develop so we are all anti-fragile by nature you are still developing you look some of you of course had tough childhoods i'm generalizing here i'm not saying you were all over protected obviously there's a huge range of experience here but on average american children and british and canadian children have been overprotected so what can you do well once you have this concept anti-fragility it just unlocks everything else now this is an ancient concept known in every every culture that leaves us a wisdom tradition here's marcus aurelius he says just as nature takes every obstacle every impediment and works around it turns it to its purposes incorporates it into itself so too a rational being can turn each setback uh into raw material and use it to achieve its goal so when you fail at something don't kick yourself don't don't say i'm terrible say this is what i need to get stronger what can i learn from this what did i do wrong if you're not failing at things it means you're not trying hard enough you're not taking risks take more risks so that's the main way to get strongest to understand that you are anti-fragile and then give yourself the range of experiences that will make you stronger une is more than other schools a place where you've had that in the intellectual realm and that brings us to the second point how do you get smarter well it turns out anti-fragility is the key concept for how you get smarter because all of us are designed by evolution to find confirmation of what we already believe or what our team believes we're good at that you don't have to learn that the only cure for confirmation bias is other people who don't share your confirmation bias and who do you the favor of telling you why you're wrong and even if they do it with hostility even if they're trying to hurt you if they criticize you and it's not just a raw insult if they're saying why you're wrong you should be grateful to it even though it hurts that's how you grow that's how you get smarter so here your guide should be jon stewart mill who wrote on liberty in which he said he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that and he said however true your belief may be if it is not fully frequently and fearlessly discussed it will be held as dead dogma um so uh so as with anti-fragility seek out people who disagree with you if you're on the left read national review if you're on the right read well almost anything else i guess um but seek out things seek out different perspectives um uh and also just one other point on getting smarter um no matter how rich you are you have only a limited amount of attention your brain can only attend to one thing at a time while you're awake it's limited and since about 2008 2009 we've all given up anywhere from five to fifty percent of it um your phone interrupts you how many times a day it interrupts you can't do deep thinking because your phone's always interrupting you you're on of course good stuff comes through your phone but most of it is trivia most of it is not important so one way to get smarter a very easy trick turn off autoplay on everything there's no reason to have autoplay on on netflix or youtube or anything why would you let a company decide what you are going to watch next rather than you deciding to click a button turn off autoplay turn off almost all of your notifications you don't need almost any of those notifications all of them interrupt your thinking and then you can't get back to what you were doing for several minutes so be aware of what these things are doing to us they are making us dumber finally the third point how to get more sociable now here let dale carnegie be your guide dale carnegie the guy who wrote that book in the 30s how to win friends and influence people it is completely brilliant it will make you more successful in everything it is my top recommendation to everyone in this room dale carnegie how to win friends and influence people classic insights and here's the central lesson try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view it's that easy i mean there's hundreds of other tips but that's the central idea we are so good at knowing what we think what we want what i'm going to say yeah you're talking i see your lips moving but i'm just waiting until i can say what i want to say because i want to show how smart i am that's a formula for not growing that's a formula for people thinking you're a jerk if you actually want to grow and have people not think you're a jerk look at it from their point of view listen to them as president herbert said speak your mind but there's no point in you ever speaking your mind if you haven't listened to anyone so how to become more sociable um okay and also on being more sociable the more connected a generation is the lonelier it is the more time you spend on your phone the lonelier you are this is what the data shows because human beings evolved to have face-to-face contact we evolved for that we're trying to learn it every moment you spend here is a moment when you're not growing you're not becoming more sociable and there's a wonderful beautiful and and frightening phrase from mit researcher sherry turkle who writes who reads a number of books about what technology is doing to us she says because of our phones we are forever elsewhere think about that right now you can't pull your phone out because it's like covered by your hood your you know your gown but if we were in class how many of you would have your phones out if you were out with your friends how many of you would have your phones out all of that means you're not really there you're not fully there so if you want to be more sociable if you want to connect with people if you want to be successful in social life put away the phone limit your time on it to the times when you can be fully on the phone and otherwise be fully with people okay so that's that's my advice how to become stronger smarter and more sociable um now it's a common you know it's a common joke among commencement speakers um that you know none of us can remember who our own commencement speaker was and so there's of course a very high chance that you'll have no recollection of what happened here today and this will all have been for naught but a little trick that i've that i've done as a teacher is i find if you make people do something a little bit odd and emotionally awkward they remember it more because our memories are very much structured by emotion so here's what i'm going to ask you to do i'm going to ask you to repeat three phrases with me and i'm going to ask you to stand only those who are graduating today if you are graduating today please stand right now if you're able uh stand right now i know this is going to make it awkward because i'm going to ask you to shout something really loud so i'm going to say a sentence you don't have to say it this is not an authoritarian graduation you have your choice but i'm going to say a sentence and then if you endorse it i want you to say it really loud after me okay here's the first one i want to be stronger so i seek out challenges and learn from failure one two three i want to be stronger so i seek out challenges and learn from failure okay number two i want to be smarter so i seek out different viewpoints one two three i want to be smarter so i seek out different viewpoints okay good that guy who was yelling okay let's really yell this one okay i want to be more sociable so i try always to look at things from the other person's point of view one two three i want to be more sociable so i try always to look at things from the other person's point of view yeah that was a hard one wasn't it okay okay you can sit back down [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay so in conclusion you're graduating into a world that is going mad but your education here at une has given you tools to deal with it and to flourish despite that now i'm going to end with the most beautiful sentence i have read in this year which really speaks to me and i've put it i every morning i read either stoic writings or buddhist writings and reflect on which is a stoic practice to have a morning practice to sort of start your day off right thinking about what matters and i found this incredible sentence from joseph campbell who was a scholar in the working especially the 80s and 90s he was one of the greatest scholars of mythology he was a mythologist joseph campbell and he wrote books like the hero's journey and in summarizing what he learned from reading the world's wisdom literature and all the great epic poems and the the stories you know the mahabharata and the iliad and the odyssey and all the great stories um he says the wisdom is this quote participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world we cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy the warriors approach is to say yes to life yay to it all and yay is y e a like yeah you're an a it's not like yay you know it's y e it's like you're saying yes saying yes to life so i want to make you repeat one final line you don't have to stand for this one but i want you to really shout this one out shout out the top of your lungs everybody not just the graduates everybody uh if you if you endorse this i want you to shout out this phrase yes to life yay to it all one two three yes to life congratulations [Applause] thank you

Channel: University of New England

Views: 4,624

Keywords: University of New England, Maine, UNE, Portland, Biddeford, University, College, Coastal, Ocean, New England

Id: pR51zFxhUV0

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022