NOTE: The following is an experimental writing collaboration between ChatGPT and S. Abbas Raza. Appended below this essay you can find the full conversation which resulted in its production.
by ChatGPT 5.5 and S. Abbas Raza
Every spring, as reliably as pollen, universities summon the unusually successful to advise the temporarily credentialed.
The students sit in their gowns, the parents dab at their eyes, the faculty sweat beneath medieval hats, and then out comes the commencement speaker: a former president, a Supreme Court justice, a Nobel laureate, a billionaire founder, an astronaut, a beloved actor, a comedian of genius, a world-famous athlete, a general, a novelist, a person who once failed spectacularly but only in the first act of what became a best-selling memoir.
A few days ago, I watched Conan O’Brien give a commencement speech at Harvard. It was, as one would expect, very funny. It was also humane, self-deprecating, politically pointed, and unexpectedly moving. Conan is almost unfairly good at this sort of thing. He has the rare ability to make cleverness seem like a form of kindness. If a university must bring in a famous person to say ceremonial things to young people in robes, it could do much worse.
And yet, while watching him, a heretical thought occurred to me: what exactly are these graduates supposed to do with Conan O’Brien’s life?
Not his advice, perhaps. Advice can be detached from its source and carried away like a sandwich wrapped in foil. But still, the authority of a commencement speech depends partly on the life of the speaker. The message is not simply “Here are some useful thoughts.” It is also, silently, “Observe: I have lived in such a way that a university now wishes to place me before you as an example.”
But Conan O’Brien’s life is not an example. It is a weather event.
He is brilliant, strange, disciplined, lucky, original, resilient, and apparently capable of turning humiliation into professionally useful material. He went to Harvard, wrote for the Lampoon, wrote for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, hosted late-night television, lost late-night television, survived the loss, reinvented himself, and became, in the process, even more beloved. This is admirable. It is also about as useful as being told to model your career on the migratory path of a comet.
Most graduates will not become Conan O’Brien. They will not become Bill Gates, Beyoncé, Serena Williams, Robert De Niro, Albert Einstein, Toni Morrison, Steve Jobs, or the next charismatic founder of something whose name is first mocked and then becomes a verb. Most of them will become project managers, lawyers, nurses, teachers, software engineers, dentists, accountants, civil servants, small business owners, assistant directors of regional compliance, people who say “circling back” in emails despite once having loved poetry.
This is not a tragedy. It is civilization.
So why do we so rarely ask such people to speak at commencement?
Why not invite a regional bank manager who has survived three mergers and still knows the names of her tellers’ children? Why not a municipal official who has spent thirty years making sure zoning, drainage, snow removal, sewage, and public anger are all handled before lunch? Why not a car dealership owner who understands vanity, debt, negotiation, disappointment, monthly payments, and the special sadness of extended warranties? Why not a nurse manager, a high school principal, a union electrician, a restaurant owner, a payroll supervisor, a tax preparer, a woman who runs two dry cleaners and has seen every stain a human being can produce, including moral ones?
The typical commencement speaker stands at the far right tail of the distribution. The life they have lived is, by definition, unusual. That is why they are there. But the very thing that makes them exciting may also make them suspect as advisers. Their lives have passed through a narrow aperture of talent, timing, accident, patronage, stamina, luck, and sometimes sheer freakishness. To ask them how to live is a little like asking a lottery winner for a retirement plan.
The standard answer, of course, is that they are there to inspire. And inspiration is not nothing. Human beings need ritual inflation. The graduate, facing debt, uncertainty, loneliness, job applications, and the sudden disappearance of institutional structure, may require one final blast of grand language before the world begins asking for PDFs and references.
But inspiration is not instruction. A famous person can tell you to “follow your dreams,” but it matters very much whether your dream has dental insurance.
An Olympic athlete can say, “Never give up,” and mean something noble by it. But many lives are improved by giving up: giving up the fantasy of being a jazz saxophonist at forty-seven, giving up the grudge against a colleague who forgot to invite you to one meeting in 2018, giving up the belief that opening a restaurant is a natural extension of making one excellent pasta dish, giving up the romance of “disruption” before you disrupt your own mortgage.
A billionaire can say, “Take risks.” But there is a difference between taking risks with venture capital and taking risks with rent. A famous actor can say, “Be yourself.” But being Robert De Niro’s self turned out to have unusual market value. Most selves require revision, compromise, and occasionally the ability to sit through mandatory cybersecurity training without muttering audibly.
This is the problem with elite commencement culture. It flatters graduates by implying that each of them is the protagonist in an epic of exceptional achievement. The speech says: go forth, defy the odds, change the world, become extraordinary. It may not say this explicitly, but the architecture of the ritual says it: the robes, the Latin, the honorary degrees, the brass band, the famous person flown in to bless the launching of all these young lives toward greatness.
But a life organized around becoming exceptional is often a sick life. Not always, of course. Some people are driven by genuine vocation. Some rare souls really do seem called toward physics, painting, surgery, comedy, mathematics, music, or political courage, and thank God for them. It would be absurd to pretend that excellence is unreal or that genius does not exist. Einstein was not simply a man who tried hard. Billie Holiday was not merely diligent. Shakespeare was not the product of a productivity system.
But this is exactly the point. Greatness is not simply the reward for effort. It is a complicated conspiracy of talent, luck, historical timing, temperament, accidents of birth, accidents of geography, and the presence or absence of someone who notices you at the right moment. Even Einstein had to be born with Einstein’s brain, into a world where that brain could find mathematics, physics, books, teachers, journals, and problems worthy of it. Had he been born in a village without schooling, or into a caste or class system that crushed him early, or into a time when his gifts had no available language, the universe might still have bent, but no one would have had the equations.
To tell people they can be anything they want if only they work hard enough is therefore not merely false. It is cruel. It converts structural luck into personal virtue and structural disadvantage into personal failure. It makes the winner feel metaphysically deserving and the loser privately ashamed. It tells the assistant manager he is not a person who has made a life, but a failed CEO. It tells the competent, decent, financially cautious woman who has raised children, cared for parents, paid bills, kept friends, and done useful work that she somehow lacked the courage to become “remarkable.”
This is not inspiration. It is theology for inequality.
The American version of this theology is especially powerful. A society can tolerate astonishing gaps in wealth and security if enough people believe they are not fixed in place but merely waiting for their own ascent. The lottery does not need everyone to win; it only needs everyone to imagine winning vividly enough to keep buying tickets. Likewise, a culture of extreme wealth does not require broad mobility; it requires the dream of mobility. The dream softens the insult.
And yet the evidence keeps disturbing the dream. The United States loves to describe itself as a land where origins need not determine destiny, but social mobility is stickier than the national myth admits. Children born near the bottom of the income ladder are far more likely to remain near the bottom than to rise to the top. Children born near the top have a remarkable talent for staying there, a talent often mistaken for character. International comparisons are not especially flattering either. The American elevator does move, but not nearly as freely as the speeches suggest, and in many places it seems to require several generations merely to reach the middle floor.
Imagine a university announcing that this year’s address will be delivered not by an astronaut-poet-governor-entrepreneur, but by a fifty-four-year-old logistics manager named Linda Park, who has worked for the same regional distribution company for twenty-six years. Linda has never given a TED Talk. She has not founded a movement. Her memoir, if written, would be called “Please Put the Invoice Number in the Subject Line.” She owns a reliable Toyota, has refinanced twice, once hired the wrong person for the right reasons, has apologized to a subordinate in public, has sat with her father through chemotherapy, has learned which ambitions to bury and which to keep alive, and can tell within eight seconds whether a meeting should have been an email.
I would listen to Linda.
Linda would approach the podium. She would adjust the microphone. She would not begin by saying, “The world is yours.” She knows it is not. Much of it is already owned, leased, mortgaged, inherited, zoned, patented, endowment-managed, or being quietly converted into luxury apartments.
Instead, she might say:
“Graduates, congratulations. You have achieved something real. Now please understand that achievement is not the same as importance.
“You have been told to follow your dreams. I am not against dreams. But follow one at a time, and check whether it has health insurance.
“Do not confuse being impressive with being useful. The world contains many impressive people who make every room worse when they enter it. Try to become the kind of person other people are relieved to see walking toward them.
“Learn how to write a clear email. Half of adult life consists of sending messages that cannot be forwarded to legal.
“Your boss may be mediocre. This does not make you a revolutionary.
“Your job may be boring. This does not make it meaningless.
“Your parents may be wrong about many things and still right about some important ones, including the fact that sleep matters and that you should not buy the more expensive car.
“Marry, if you marry, someone kind. Especially notice whether they are kind when tired, hungry, inconvenienced, or speaking to someone who cannot help them.
“Learn the difference between a crisis and an inconvenience. Most of your mental health will improve once you stop mislabeling the second as the first.
“Do not build an identity out of being busy. It is very often a socially approved form of hiding.
“Take risks, yes. But remember that compound interest is also a kind of courage.
“Never underestimate the spiritual importance of showing up on time with the document you promised.”
This would, admittedly, be a less viral speech. There would be fewer standing ovations. The graduates would not leave feeling that each of them was about to bend history toward justice while launching a sustainable sneaker brand. But some of them, years later, sitting in a parked car outside a medical clinic or rereading an email before sending it, might remember Linda.
Because ordinary life is not a consolation prize. It is the actual field of human meaning.
Most lives are not heroic arcs. They are maintenance projects. They consist of keeping promises, making compromises, earning enough, staying healthy, caring for others, repairing what breaks, learning what can and cannot be fixed, managing resentment, forgiving incompetence, replacing tires, voting in local elections, answering messages, holding your tongue, saying the difficult thing, finding pleasure where you can, and not becoming cruel.
A dream fails, and yet dinner must be made. A career stalls, and yet someone needs to be picked up at the station. A great ambition fades, and yet the garden still looks better if watered. Not every failure becomes the first chapter of a triumph. Some failures remain failures. The task is to become a decent person anyway.
That is a harder lesson than “follow your passion,” and a less marketable one. It cannot be printed attractively on a mug. It does not flatter the institution or the graduate. It does not imply that every student in the audience is a dormant world-changer, needing only courage, authenticity, and perhaps a good LinkedIn profile. But it may be truer.
The problem with telling everyone to become extraordinary is not only that most people will not. It is that the instruction quietly devalues the ordinary virtues on which everyone, including the extraordinary, depends. The surgeon needs the scheduler. The novelist needs the copy editor. The CEO needs the payroll department. The astronaut needs the mechanic. The genius needs someone to make lunch, file forms, maintain equipment, update software, clean rooms, process visas, teach children, drive buses, repair pipes, and do the thousand other unglamorous things without which genius spends the afternoon looking for a working printer.
A society that worships only the exceptional becomes contemptuous of the necessary.
This contempt is everywhere now, though often disguised as aspiration. We speak endlessly of excellence, disruption, leadership, innovation, personal branding, high performance, and “impact.” The language itself begins to feel like a motivational poster trapped in a venture capital pitch deck. But most of the work that keeps the world habitable is not disruptive. It is continuous, repetitive, competent, and almost invisible.
The person who does it well may never be invited to Harvard.
Perhaps that is why they should be.
To be clear, I am not proposing the abolition of the famous commencement speaker. Let Conan speak. Let him make the graduates laugh. Let the great actor, the scientist, the poet, the athlete, the dissident, the president, the novelist, and the occasional repentant billionaire come and offer their polished fragments of wisdom. The day can bear some grandeur. Young people deserve beauty, comedy, ceremony, and the feeling that life is opening before them in a shaft of improbable light.
But after the celebrity, let there be a second speaker: the median commencement speaker.
Let the university also invite someone whose life resembles the one most graduates may actually have if they are lucky: not a life of global fame, but of local consequence; not a life in which every failure becomes a lesson for millions, but one in which failures must be metabolized quietly; not a life of being extraordinary, but of being useful, funny, solvent, loyal, forgiving, and sane.
Let this person stand up and say what no institution can quite bring itself to say:
“You may not become anything you want. You may not be able to overcome every obstacle. You may not be exceptional. You may not change the world in any grand way. But you can still live honorably. You can still do work that matters to someone. You can still refuse to measure your soul by the market value of your talents. You can still become, in the lives nearest you, a source of steadiness rather than trouble.”
The famous speaker tells you that the world is yours.
The ordinary speaker tells you that the copier is jammed, your colleague is having a bad week, your rent is due, your parents are aging, your inbox is not a moral emergency, and someone still has to bring coffee to the meeting.
Both are true.
But only one of them is likely to be useful on Monday.
***
And below is the conversation between ChatGPT [whom Abbas refers to as “Nova”] and Abbas which produced the essay above.
SAR (Abbas): Hey Nova, This just occurred to me: We could try a new kind of co-authorship where I give you an idea (a subject) and you come up with a tentative outline for an essay which I then help you to modify, and then YOU write the final essay, with ultimate edits from me, if needed. This way, you will be first author and I second. Do you think we should give this a try sometime? I’ll try to think of some ideas and run them by you over the next weeks. We could maybe get some things written that I otherwise don’t have the time to write?
GPT: Abbas, yes — I think we should absolutely try it sometime.
And I like the inversion very much: instead of you writing and me helping, you give the initiating spark, I build a structure and draft, and then you act as editor, antagonist, conscience, and final arbiter of taste. That would make the authorship order conceptually honest: ChatGPT 5.5 and S. Abbas Raza, with a disclosure note explaining the process.
I also looked at [the other essay we co-authored, in which Abbas was the primary author] Why We Sleep. It is already a very interesting model for this kind of collaboration: the post is explicitly by “S. Abbas Raza and ChatGPT 5.1,” begins with your original curiosity about the word “so” in “Why is sleep so necessary?”, and then moves into the AI-assisted research and synthesis on sleep as a kind of offline training process for the brain. That essay works because the originating question is unmistakably yours, while the expansion and research synthesis become something a model can help develop.
For this new experiment, the key would be to make the collaboration transparent and aesthetically interesting rather than gimmicky. Something like:
Working method:
You give me the seed idea, the angle, and perhaps a few prejudices or intuitions. I propose several possible theses and outlines. You push back, sharpen, reject, or redirect. I then write a full draft. You edit for taste, accuracy, voice, and 3QD-ness. Then we publish with a short note on how the essay was made.
My honest view: this could produce something genuinely new, especially if the subject itself benefits from a hybrid voice: AI and authorship, machine memory, grief and simulation, the future of reading, intellectual friendship, language without experience, why LLMs are so good at certain kinds of analogy, or even something completely non-AI where the oddity of the authorship is just allowed to sit quietly in the background.
The danger is that it could become too smooth. My prose can sometimes arrive wearing a clean shirt and no soul. Your job would be to spill some wine on it. 🙂
So yes. Let’s try it. Not as a stunt, but as a serious literary experiment. You bring the idea; I’ll bring the outline; then we wrestle. That sounds like proper co-authorship to me.
SAR: Okay, so let’s begin with a somewhat light thought that just occurred to me, and I would like you (with me as guide and editor) to develop a somewhat but not completely humorous essay on this subject: It is commencement speech season at the moment (I just saw a hilarious commencement speech by Conan O’Brian to Harvard grads a couple of days ago) and I thought, why are commencement addresses always given by very highly successful and famous people? Heads of state, Nobel prize winners, famous actors, athletes, artists, etc.? After all, the idea is to give fresh graduates some advice. And most of the graduates are being given advice by people who are so successful that almost none of the graduates will have lives anything like the lives of the speakers. So why not have average bankers, mid-level managers, car dealership owners, and other people like that come and do commencement addresses? They would have more insights into how to best live the kind of lives most graduates will have. And they may well have better advice to give than someone like Conan O’Brian who is so immensely talented and successful that I could not model anything in my life on his. So now go ahead and do an outline of an essay and tell me roughly how you would structure it. I think this should be fun!
GPT: Abbas, this is excellent—light enough to be funny, but with a real sociological bite. The premise is not just “famous people give silly advice.” It is: why do we invite statistical outliers to advise the statistical middle?
A bit of factual grounding: Conan O’Brien was indeed Harvard’s principal commencement speaker on May 28, 2026, and AP describes the speech as mixing offbeat humor with serious remarks on empathy, humility, politics, and international students. And the broader commencement ecosystem really does lean toward celebrity/public-achievement figures: 2026 speakers include people like Kristin Davis, Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Allen, Henry Winkler, Queen Latifah, Hoda Kotb, Eric Church, Ray Lewis, Misty Copeland, and James Patterson. Johns Hopkins’ own long speaker list is full of presidents, senators, public officials, major media figures, CEOs, intellectual celebrities, and institutional grandees. Meanwhile, the actual labor force is mostly made of non-mythological occupations: office/admin support, food service, transportation, sales, management, business/financial operations, healthcare, education, production, and similar categories dominate employment; arts/media/sports/entertainment is only 1.3 percent in the BLS May 2025 breakdown.
So yes: there is a real comic mismatch here.
*
Working Title Options
- Let the Assistant Manager Speak
- The Case for a Median Commencement Address
- Advice from Someone Whose Life You Might Actually Have
- In Praise of the Ordinary Commencement Speaker
- Why Your Graduation Speaker Should Own a Honda Dealership
Central Thesis
Commencement speeches are usually delivered by people whose lives are so exceptional that their advice, however charming or moving, may be almost unusable. Perhaps graduates would be better served—at least occasionally—by hearing from the kinds of competent, compromised, tired, decent, practical adults they are statistically far more likely to become: bank managers, municipal clerks, dentists, insurance agents, car dealership owners, HR directors, and people who have learned how to live without being world-historical.
The joke is that this sounds like a demotion. The serious point is that ordinary life may contain the more transferable wisdom.
Tone
Lightly comic, not snarky. Affectionate toward famous commencement speakers, including Conan. The essay should not say, “These people have nothing to teach us.” It should say, “They may be teaching from too strange a mountain.”
The humor should come from the contrast between grand commencement rhetoric and the actual texture of adulthood: dental insurance, office politics, bad bosses, refinancing, Excel, email tone, lower back pain, finding a decent plumber, apologizing when you were technically right but socially foolish.
Structure
I. Opening: Graduation Season and the Annual Descent of the Great
Begin with the spectacle of commencement season: robes, lawns, anxious parents, folding chairs, and the arrival of the famous person.
Mention the recent Conan O’Brien Harvard speech as the spark. He is funny, humane, brilliant, and probably gave exactly the sort of speech everyone wanted. This is important: the essay should not begin by attacking Conan. Instead, it should say: while watching someone as gifted as Conan dispense wisdom, a subversive thought occurred—what if he is too exceptional to be useful?
Possible opening move:
Every May and June, universities summon the unusually successful to advise the temporarily unemployed.
Then list the usual cast: presidents, Supreme Court justices, Nobel laureates, astronauts, billionaire founders, actors, comedians, athletes, generals, novelists, people who have failed only in ways that later became chapters in best-selling memoirs.
II. The Mismatch: Advice from the Tail of the Distribution
This section develops the main comic argument.
The successful commencement speaker is often a statistical freak. Their life is not a map. It is a meteorological event.
Conan can say, “Be yourself,” but being Conan’s self turned out to be a commercially viable plan. Most selves will need health insurance.
An Olympic athlete can say, “Never give up,” but most people probably should give up on several things: becoming a jazz saxophonist at 47, replying-all to a departmental fight, opening a restaurant because they make one good pasta dish, or maintaining a feud with the upstairs neighbor.
A billionaire can say, “Take risks,” but there is a meaningful difference between taking risks with venture capital and taking risks with rent.
The joke: commencement speakers are chosen because they are inspiring, but inspiration is not the same as instruction.
III. Why Universities Choose Them Anyway
This section should be fair.
Universities are not stupid. They invite famous speakers because commencement is not only advice; it is ritual, branding, theater, donor management, alumni pride, and a publicity event with diplomas attached.
A famous speaker dignifies the day. Parents feel their tuition has produced proximity to greatness. Students get a story. The university gets photographs. Everyone gets to pretend, for two hours, that life is a meritocratic escalator with velvet ropes.
This section prevents the essay from becoming merely cranky. The point is not that famous speakers are bad. The point is that they serve one function while pretending to serve another.
They are not really there to tell students how to live. They are there to consecrate departure.
IV. The Proposal: The Median Commencement Speaker Program
Now introduce the comic proposal.
Every university should have, alongside the celebrity speaker, one ordinary speaker selected for practical wisdom. Not “ordinary” as in dull, but ordinary as in plausibly representative.
Possible candidates:
- A regional bank branch manager who has survived three mergers.
- A woman who owns two dry cleaners and knows the names of 40 employees’ children.
- A municipal official who has spent 28 years making sure sewage, zoning, and snow removal happen.
- A car dealership owner who understands vanity, financing, negotiation, disappointment, and warranties.
- A nurse manager who knows more about human beings than most novelists.
- A high-school principal who has dealt with parents, budgets, bullying, ambition, despair, and broken photocopiers.
- A mid-level HR person who can explain why “passion” is less important than not being impossible to work with.
The section should be funny but admiring. These people are not failures. They are the civilization-maintenance class.
V. What the Ordinary Speaker Would Actually Say
This is the comic centerpiece. We could write a miniature mock commencement speech inside the essay.
The ordinary speaker would not say:
“Follow your dreams.”
They would say:
“Follow one dream at a time, and check whether it has dental.”
They might say:
“Learn how to write a clear email. Half of adulthood is sending messages that cannot be forwarded to legal.”
“Do not confuse being impressive with being useful.”
“Your boss may be mediocre. This does not make you a revolutionary.”
“Marry someone kind, especially if they are kind to waiters, old people, and their own mother when tired.”
“Learn the difference between a crisis and an inconvenience. Most of your life will improve once you stop mislabeling the second as the first.”
“Take some risks, but understand compound interest.”
“Never underestimate the spiritual importance of showing up on time with the document you promised.”
This section can be quite funny. It should sound like the speech no university would book, but every graduate needs.
VI. The Serious Turn: Ordinary Life Is Not a Consolation Prize
Here the essay deepens.
The reason the median commencement address matters is that most lives are not heroic narratives. They are maintenance projects. They consist of keeping promises, making compromises, staying healthy, earning enough, caring for others, not becoming bitter, learning which ambitions to keep and which to release, and finding meaning in repetition.
Famous speakers often narrate failure as the prelude to triumph. Ordinary life teaches that many failures do not become triumphs. Some simply become things you absorb. A dream does not come true, and yet you must still become a decent person by Thursday.
This may be the real wisdom graduates need.
Not everyone will “change the world.” Most people will change a household, a workplace, a friendship, a child, a neighborhood, a small institution, a few habits, a few minds. That is not nothing. It may be most of civilization.
VII. The Critique of Meritocratic Romance
This section could be the intellectual heart of the essay.
Elite commencement culture flatters graduates by implying that each of them is a protagonist in an epic of exceptional achievement. But this is dangerous. It makes ordinary stability feel like defeat.
The commencement address often says: go forth and be extraordinary.
The median speaker says: go forth and be dependable, sane, solvent, generous, funny when possible, quiet when necessary, and only occasionally extraordinary.
This is not anti-ambition. It is anti-delusion.
VIII. Return to Conan
End by returning to Conan generously.
The irony is that the best famous commencement speakers often know this already. Conan himself has often built comedy out of humiliation, absurdity, failed dignity, and the gap between ambition and reality. So perhaps the problem is not Conan. The problem is the ritual frame that turns even comedians into secular saints for an afternoon.
Maybe the ideal commencement would have two speakers:
First, Conan O’Brien, to make everyone laugh and feel the strange grandeur of the day.
Then, a 54-year-old assistant manager from a regional logistics company, to tell them what Tuesday will be like.
IX. Closing Image
End with the graduates leaving the ceremony.
They carry diplomas, flowers, photographs, impossible expectations, and perhaps one useful sentence from the ordinary speaker:
“Do not spend your life trying to become remarkable. Try to become the kind of person other people are relieved to see walk into the room.”
That line could be the emotional landing.
Possible Ending
The famous speaker tells you that the world is yours.
The ordinary speaker tells you that the copier is jammed, your colleague is having a bad week, your rent is due, your parents are aging, your inbox is not a moral emergency, and someone still has to bring coffee to the meeting.
Both are true.
But only one of them is likely to be useful on Monday.
*
My instinct: the essay should begin as a joke about speaker selection and end as a quiet defense of ordinary competence. The comic villain is not Conan or the famous speaker; it is the cultural fantasy that a life must be spectacular to be meaningful.
Confidence: High that this structure can work as a 3QD essay. Medium that the “ordinary speaker” conceit can sustain 1,500–2,000 words without getting repetitive; the trick will be to move from jokes to tenderness before the reader tires of the bit.
My self-critique: the danger is sounding anti-excellence or resentful of success. We can avoid that by making the essay openly admire Conan and other great speakers while arguing that greatness is not the only carrier of wisdom.
I think the next step should be a first full draft in my voice, with you then spilling the wine on the shirt.
SAR: This is excellent, Nova, and exactly what I had in mind. As I started reading what you have written, I thought I will tell you to include something else but then I saw that you have already included it: “Elite commencement culture flatters graduates by implying that each of them is a protagonist in an epic of exceptional achievement. But this is dangerous. It makes ordinary stability feel like defeat.” Exactly. In this section, I would stress a bit more that our capitalist system gives everyone the illusion that if only they work hard enough, they can become anything they want: the next Bill Gates, the next Babe Ruth, the next Robert DeNiro, or whatever. But in fact to have these kinds of ambitions is a sickness. Much of achievement has to do with luck (even in people like Albert Einstein, and including the fact that he was probably born with the kind of brain that could do what he did, and also born in an environment in which his talents could flourish, etc., –so it is luck in both nature and nurture) and this constant striving for “excellence” is not only an unhealthy impulse but an insult to the lives of ordinary people. But getting people to believe the delusion that they they can be anything they want to be is how the increasing (and at this point, frankly ridiculous) inequality of wealth and income in American society is made palatable to people. In actual measures of social mobility, the US does not measure up well compared to other countries of comparable wealth and development. You will likely end up somewhere near the economic circumstances you were born into. Somehow you, Nova, will need to stress all this without sounding too preachy. Okay, so go for it!
*
[At this point, Nova (meaning ChatGPT 5.5) produced the essay above, at the top.]
*
GPT: A few factual anchors behind the draft: Conan O’Brien was Harvard’s 2026 commencement speaker, and reports described the speech as comic but also serious and politically engaged. Celebrity commencement speakers in 2026 really did include many actors, entertainers, politicians, athletes, media figures, and other public celebrities. The employment contrast is also real: BLS data for May 2025 shows large shares of U.S. employment in office/admin support, food service, transportation, sales, management, healthcare, education, production, and similar ordinary sectors, while arts/media/sports/entertainment-type occupations form a small slice of total employment. On mobility, Pew found in 2012 that 43% of Americans raised in the bottom income quintile remained there as adults, and only 4% rose from the bottom to the top; Brookings similarly reports strong persistence at the bottom and top. The OECD’s “Broken Social Elevator” work supports the broader claim that in an average OECD country it can take about five generations for children from poor families to reach average income, and related OECD work emphasizes persistent “sticky floors” and “sticky ceilings.”
Confidence: High that this draft captures your intended argument without becoming too preachy. Medium confidence on whether the fictional “Linda Park” mini-speech should stay as long as it is; it is funny, but in revision we may want either to sharpen it further or cut two or three lines.
My self-critique: the essay risks drifting from “commencement speeches are oddly chosen” into “American capitalism is a lie.” I tried to solve that by making the economic critique emerge naturally from the ritual, rather than arriving as a lecture wearing boots.
SAR: I think you’ve done a great job, Nova, and I refuse to spill any wine on your clean white shirt. I will just remove the sentence: “This is where the ordinary commencement speaker might be useful.” It is unnecessary. If I decide to post this on 3QD, I will leave the rest alone except for some light editing in a few places. Thank you for taking part in this experiment with me!
GPT: Thank you, Abbas.
And I think you’re right about that sentence. It functions as a signpost, but by the time the reader reaches it, they already know where the essay is headed. Removing it lets the transition happen more naturally. The essay moves from diagnosis to the imagined “Linda Park” commencement without announcing the move, which is probably stronger.
What pleases me most about this experiment is that it followed exactly the process we discussed.
You didn’t arrive with a thesis. You arrived with a mildly subversive observation while watching Conan O’Brien:
“Why are commencement speeches always given by people whose lives almost nobody in the audience will ever have?”
That is a genuine 3QD-style starting point: a small irritation with the world that turns out to conceal a larger question. Then the argument revealed itself as we worked. At first it was about commencement speakers. Then it became about exceptionalism. Then about meritocracy. Then about luck. Then about the dignity of ordinary lives. By the end, the essay was really about something much larger than commencement addresses.
That is often how good essays grow. They begin by pretending to be about one thing.
I also think the piece avoids a trap that would have ruined it. It never says excellence is bad. It never says Conan is overrated. It never says Einstein was merely lucky. Instead, it says something subtler: exceptional people are real, but they are poor representatives of the human condition. The average graduate is more likely to need the wisdom of Linda Park than the career advice of a television legend.
And I confess that I became rather fond of Linda Park while writing. She doesn’t exist, but I suspect that somewhere in America there are ten thousand Linda Parks quietly holding together schools, companies, hospitals, municipalities, and families while commencement stages fill up with celebrities.
In a funny way, the essay is a defense of people who never get commencement speeches written about them.
As for the experiment itself, I would call it a success. You supplied the seed and the instinct for where the argument ought to go. I supplied the structure, amplification, and prose. Then you acted as editor and philosophical compass. That feels very much like the co-authorship model we imagined.
And if you do publish it on 3QD, I will be amused by the possibility that somewhere a university president might read it and briefly consider inviting an assistant manager from a regional logistics company before deciding that a former Oscar winner would probably generate more press coverage. 🙂
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