🌻 the old world is dying

opinionated advice for c/o 2026 graduates

This post originally appeared in Jasmi.News.

“Humans will not win by trying to outrun the AIs.”

J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway

It’s a scary time to be twenty-two. Recently, I’ve been watching videos of college commencement speakers getting pummeled by boos for talking about AI. I’ve seen the charts showing post-graduate employment rates for engineering majors falling by 5 to 15 percent. And it’s not as if young people were having an easy time getting good jobs, buying homes, and starting families before AI. They say that every technological revolution screws over the transitional generation. Today, it’s all transition, all the time.

A little over five years ago, I also graduated into a global crisis. In 2021, Covid kept us quarantined in four-to-ten person pods, Zoom calls still dominated socialization, and long vaccine waitlists rationed real-world mobility. Tech companies were beginning to recover from 2020’s hiring freezes (though new grad hiring would take another nosedive in late 2022); everywhere, newsrooms continued to shrink. After taking a leave of absence from Stanford and extending it three quarters in a row, I finally internalized the fact that I was never going to return. I broke up with my college boyfriend, moved first back home, and then into two co-ops full of strangers. I found and started work with no diploma. Once vaccinated, I signed a lease in New York for no reason except that I could. Forward was the only way.