Dear graduating class of 2024: Stop worrying so much about your future (2024)

Dear graduates of 2024, stop worrying so much.

Stop worrying how everyone else perceives you.

Stop worrying about things you can’t control in your young life.

Stop worrying if you’re overweight or underweight or anything else about your weight. Or your looks. Or your image.

Stop worrying if you don’t have your career all planned out. You’ll likely have more careers than your parents and grandparents had jobs in their life.

Stop worrying if you’ll succeed as an adult. You will. And you won’t. Sometimes on the same day.

With pomp and circ*mstance behind you, and open houses on the horizon, now is the time to glance back and peek ahead. First and foremost you need to realize that youth is your superpower. Use this to your advantage. You have no idea how young you actually are, whether you’re 18 or 22. This is a blessing that slowly fades away with each new year.

Take it from someone who has worried about all of these things and so much more since I escaped school with little more than a master’s degree in insecurity. To this day, decades after I attended high school (with a cup of coffee at college), I still worry about things that haunted me in my youth.

Don’t let this happen to you.

Don’t haul around emotional baggage from your teenage years into your twenties and forties and sixties, as I have stupidly done.

Don’t let “adults” intimidate you or overwhelm you or belittle you. Just because they’re older doesn’t mean they’re wiser. We’re all working on mysteries without any clues, despite our age.

Don’t drag your childhood insecurities into adulthood like a farmer hauling work mules through an endless field. You already have enough pressures planted deeply in your psyche to be “successful.”

As I'm writing today’s column, I received a press release from Thomas Edison Junior Senior High School in Lake Station regarding its graduation ceremony on Sunday. It stated in part: “We are immensely proud of our graduating students. We are confident that they will continue to excel and make significant contributions to society.”

This isn’t necessarily true. Society’s confidence in high school and college graduates historically comes with a caveat, defined by “stipulations, conditions or limitations.” Many of this year’s grads will not continue to excel or make significant contributions to society.

Some grads will plod along in life, never actualizing their true potential and never overcoming the challenges awaiting them every day, every year. They will struggle. They will disappoint loved ones. They will disappoint themselves. And that’s OK.

Not everyone will be what’s conventionally considered a “success” in life. Look around at the older adults from, say 30 to 60, in your daily world. Some of them simply never met the lofty expectations they were saddled with as young adults. They may have fell down along the way. They may have been pushed down. They may have never cared to meet those expectations.

That’s OK too.

Some of this year’s grads will not meet similar expectations. Others will overachieve and surprise themselves. All of them will grow up to become different identities to different people — a hero, a villain, an afterthought or an annoyance, among other societal labels that will stick to them like flypaper as they age. It may not be fair but it’s how life works.

To some people, you may be hated. To others, you will be loved. It’s more about how others interpret you and what role you play in their life. Their prism of reality will not even remotely resemble yours. Your telescope of truth will be their kaleidoscope of chaos. You’ll never see things eye to eye, nor be able to discuss it heart to heart.

Throughout all the ups and downs, joys and pains, hopes and failures, keep one thing in mind: Don’t let other people’s perception of you become your reality.