Well, Class of 2010, you probably think the party’s over: time to put away the beer bongs and the ping-pong balls, the cargo shorts and the cut-offs, and get serious. From the cap and gown it’s straight to the coat and tie.
Henceforth the break of dawn isn’t when you conk out; it’s when you wake up – in your own bed. Rise and shine! Time to pay down those student loans! You don’t want to be saddled with that debt when you start making payments on the house, the car, the baby, the baby’s college education…
I sometimes think the real reason for all the binge drinking among you undergraduates is that you have this idea that this is the last fun you will ever have so you’d better take it to the limit.
It’s understandable, really. The emblematic images of adulthood are the taxpayer with a calculator, a pile of receipts and a set of IRS forms, the commuter trapped in rush-hour traffic, Mom at the skillet or Dad mowing the lawn.
Work, work, work. Eight hours per day, five days per week, 50, maybe even 51 weeks per year, at the start. Even interesting work can become boring and exhausting at that pace. And that’s just the paying gig.
Let us acknowledge the grim arithmetic of a typical adult week. You start with 168 hours. Lop off 60 for work, factoring in getting up and ready and out and back. Subtract another 60 for bed and bedtime routines. Now you’re down to 48 hours. Sounds like a nice chunk of leisure time, except we haven’t subtracted the hours you have to devote to body maintenance, car maintenance, home maintenance, money management. Let’s say those activities take up half of the time that remains. That leaves 24 hours, or one entire day out of seven that’s pure ‘west and wewaxation,’ as Elmer Fudd puts it.
Not enough? Well I agree it’s a shame that we have to spend so many of our waking hours making a living — whatever happened to the four-day or 30-hour work week, anyway? — but that’s why you did the right thing by completing your bachelor’s degrees: It greatly increases your chances of finding a job that is both intrinsically worth doing and challenging enough to make you feel proud of your ability to do it.
Yes, contrary to what you’ve heard all your life, work is not the opposite of play. President Obama said it well in his inaugural address: ‘There is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.’
That word ‘satisfying’ and its twin, ‘gratifying,’ are the keys to a happy adulthood. Think of them as the grownup versions of the word ‘fun.’ Trust me, it won’t be long before you won’t have the slightest desire to crash the party when you walk past a lawn littered with empty cans of bad beer, where smelly and sloppy drunks are shouting nonsense over loud, bad music.
Instead, a lot of your pleasures will become quieter, calmer, simpler; more intimate, more beautiful, more profound. And as your appreciations become subtler, the pleasures are more readily available. You won’t need to get wasted or go to an amusement park or go on vacation to have a good time. A walk around the block with your sweetheart on a beautiful evening after a good meal will do the trick. Heck, cleaning out the garage might do it — a perfect example of an activity that may not be fun but is sure to be satisfying.
All right, so maybe cleaning out the garage isn’t the best example of the joys of adulthood. Maybe all I’ve demonstrated so far is that adulthood is so boring that adults lapse into a state of catatonia so profound that they don’t even notice how boring their lives are.
A better example of the things people do with their precious leisure time might be volunteering. Are people who serve on planning commissions, or sell snacks and drinks at Little League games or clean streambeds or work a shift at the Food Bank having fun? Some might be. Are they improving the quality of their own lives while making their communities better places to live? Absolutely.
So cheer up, graduates. ‘Happy adulthood’ isn’t an oxymoron. Adulthood might even be happier than late adolescence. Fewer pimples, for one thing. Fewer awkward moments (you don’t embarrass as easily). Fewer head-in-the-toilet moments. Fewer hangovers. Fewer mornings of waking up in last night’s clothes or worse, without last night’s clothes or any recollection of how they came off.
If nothing else, you now have one thing you didn’t have when you were an undergraduate: fond memories of being in college.
