Anxiety and Opportunity for College Graduates of 2025
Script of commencement speech by Tom Gruber, delivered May 10, 2025
Wow, it’s great to be here, celebrating with you.
It’s the year 2025, and the future has arrived ahead of schedule. We have technology to create Artificial Intelligence and artificial life and an artificially altered climate. Everything is moving fast and the future is harder than ever to predict or control.
It’s an especially challenging time to start a career, or a family. If I were in your position, I would be mildly freaking out.
But don’t worry, I’m not going to “kill the vibe”. While there is real cause for anxiety, I have some good news for you. Because for many of the things that scare me about the world today, I am just as excited about the opportunities it offers you as a new college grad. And that is what I am going to talk about today.
Let’s start with a little trick I learned as a psychology major at Loyola. Don’t roll your eyes now, psych majors do learn some useful stuff in college, and yes, parents it was worth the money. 🙂 So here’s the psychology trick: you can turn anxiety into excitement. It turns out that you can have the same physical symptoms, like elevated heart rate and muscle tension, yet have two very different emotional responses, like excitement versus fear. The difference is how you think about it, such as whether you think you have any control over the situation.
For example, right now up here on the podium I am experiencing some of these symptoms. I could be freaking out. Public speaking can be terrifying. But today, instead of fear, I feel excitement, because I see this as a chance to celebrate with you.
Transforming fear to excitement is a superpower. Let’s try it out, to transform how we might feel about some of the scary things in the world today into exciting opportunities.
Scary Thing #1 is a crisis of knowing what to believe. As a society, we are Drowning in Data, but Starving for Truth. The problem is not a lack of information, but a breakdown in the consensus on what it means to know something, how to decide what is true or useful knowledge.
As a society that lives online, we quickly jump to conclusions based on nothing more than amplified rumors. We confuse popularity with truth. Our trust in science, the foundation of progress, is in decline. Authoritative, respected sources of information have been displaced by the feeding trough of social media. And with AI it is now easy to fabricate engaging, realistic content that has no basis in reality.
As an educated person, you know the importance of getting good information and staying informed. But if we live in a society that doesn’t know what to believe, drowning in a sea of bad information, how can a young professional make the important decisions in life?
The remedy to the crisis of knowing is the cognitive skill of sense making – the ability to find meaningful insights from complex or ambiguous information. You already practice sense making in many ways. When your BS detector goes off to warn you about something that doesn’t make sense, that’s sense-making. Your scientific training gives you a more systematic method for gathering data and drawing meaningful conclusions. From your education you have also learned to analyze a set of facts for logical consistency, and to examine the evidential basis for something you read in the media. These are aspects of critical thinking, which is also sense making.
I have found that sense-making skills, forged in undergraduate education, have been extremely valuable throughout my life — when doing research, creating new companies, designing new products, and even evaluating medical advice.
And in today’s professional job market, sense making is a valuable career skill. Modern executives aren’t just bosses; they’re decision-makers who analyze information and make reliable predictions. Many of the highest-paying jobs for new graduates – like data science – are professional applications of sense-making. By strengthening your ability to assess evidence and think critically, you can thrive in a data-driven world.
Scary Thing #2 is the future of work. The basis of your future employment is the knowledge economy, which is undergoing tectonic shifts. As an expert in Artificial intelligence, I assure you (although it isn’t very reassuring) that AI will soon be able automate much of the work traditionally done by new college graduates. I don’t mean this as a warning, but as a prediction, like a prediction of a coming storm.
You are graduating at a turning point in the role of higher education for employment. In the coming years, “knowing things” will have decreasing market value as AI becomes a reliable source of specialized knowledge.
So if the content of what you learned in your field is has a limited shelf life, how do you choose which skills to invest in for your career?
Well, that degree you are about to get certifies that, at the very least, you have learned how to learn. You have learned how to do research from books and papers, to search databases and the web, and to gather new data. You’ve learned to analyze and synthesize from multiple sources, and to communicate what you learned. These are basic tasks of knowledge work.
But these are also the tasks that AI promises to automate.
So, if the content of what you learned in school has a limited market value, and the process of learning new information can be automated, what will be most valued in the future of work? It’s your ability to manage the knowledge work done by AI. You, the newly educated graduates of 2025, will soon have a workforce of skilled assistants at your command. There’s good news here as well. Even if you have never been a manager, you are highly qualified to lead the team. Here’s why:
What makes a good manager? A good manager can effectively delegate tasks to the employees because the manager already knows how to do the tasks. In the future of work, you will delegate work to AI agents, who will do the research and generate results. Because you know how to do these tasks, you can effectively delegate the work. Because you have a basic foundation of knowledge in your field, you can identify errors that can’t be right (there’s that sense-making skill again) or spot genuine breakthroughs in the anomalies that pop up.
For example, a newly-minted communications major might seek a job to write content for a brand, one piece at a time. In the world of AI-augmented work, the new graduate could do the job of a content strategist who understands the brand voice and the psychology and cultural needs of markets. They can delegate tasks to AI to research trending topics, analyze engagement metrics, and generate variations of potential marketing ideas. The human can then evaluate how the various proposals align with brand values and might be perceived and experienced emotionally by the target audience — something better left to human judgment.
This is the new division of labor between human and machine. You are not responsible so much to know things, or to do information processing — you are responsible for understanding the problem at hand, in the full context of human values and needs. AI is the master at learning from the past; you are the master of understanding the present.
Now for our third and final source of anxiety: let’s call it the failure of collective intelligence. The systems that help humans make collective decisions and take collective action, like governments and economic systems, are starting to fail. Around the world, democracies are in trouble. Autocrats are coming to power on waves of propaganda and fear. The rule of law is being replaced by the rule of men — who are unbound by civil norms. People risk physical harm over what they say in public. This is cause for anxiety, even fear. What can you do, as an individual who cares about human freedom and a civil society?
I’m afraid we can’t fix the collective intelligence problem by just appointing ourselves as leaders and taking control. But we can develop leadership in our inner world – what we might call inner mastery. Inner mastery comes from a deep understanding of the internal forces acting on us: emotions, memories, habits, and beliefs. Mastery is not domination or control; it’s mastering the skills of a leader who embraces the complexity of our inner life, and aligns the self toward goals and values. It’s like being the captain of a ship in stormy seas. You can’t control the weather or the waves, but with steadfast direction and a good compass, you can navigate the storm and reach your destination safely.
I got an early start on inner mastery from a course in Zen Buddhism. I learned techniques for self-reflection, awareness without attachment, and exploring the relationship between mind and body. These skills have been valuable for my entire life. For example, after spending years building my first company to be ready to go public, I watched it collapse due to an economic recession – which I had no control over. Many of us went into deep depression at that point. Meditation training had taught me to view difficult circumstances with equanimity, without getting caught up in it. So, having lost my job and my company, I took it as an opportunity to travel the world, which led to starting a new company in the travel business.
We all have our own paths to inner mastery. As a successful graduate, you have mastered the skill of managing your time and attention to succeed in your courses – while still having a healthy social life. (You did have a healthy social life here in New Orleans, right?). You might have developed motivational skills by training for a sport, or explored emotional terrain in romantic relationships. For many of us, the source of learning is a spiritual practice, gaining inner awareness from a relationship with something beyond the self.
Inner mastery is essential in times like these, when our society feels broken, when it seems like we have no control over the craziness around us. It allows us to engage with a difficult environment without being overwhelmed by it, to make moral choices with confidence – resisting the external forces that would take us off course. Just as sense making gives us confidence in knowing what to believe, inner mastery allows us to know with conviction what it means for humans to have rights, that there are correct answers to moral questions, that not everything is a matter of opinion. Inner mastery might be the most critical skill in an unpredictable world that is beyond our individual control.
What is the common thread that ties this all together?
I boil it down to this: optimize your life for human agency.
What does this phrase mean?
Human agency is the capability to make choices and take actions that influence your life. Agency is having the freedom to choose, and the ability to choose with awareness and intention. Agency is different than Power, which is about controlling others.
Optimizing your life for Agency means maximizing your optionality and freedom to adapt, so you can navigate an uncertain future. Agency is not about making the right choices, it is about giving your self the best shot at making good choices, arranging to have options and the inner resources to make wise decisions.
And as we’ve seen, when the world is scary, you can reframe how you approach it, to give yourself an opportunity that builds on your educational experience.
To rise above the crisis of knowing what to believe, you can hone your sense-making skills so you can choose good sources of information, trust your knowledge and decisions, and stay out of the maelstrom of misinformation.
To stay agile in the future of work, embrace new problems beyond your training, and harness technology to work for you.
To stay grounded in a world that we cannot control, cultivate inner mastery, so you can make choices with intention and awareness. When things feels scary, look for the exciting opportunity, and steer your ship in that direction.
Above all else, to have agency means keeping your mind propped wide open, held open against the winds of uncertainty, knowing that you will sometimes be wrong and will make poor choices, but you will always be able to learn and adapt and thrive in an unpredictable future. This is the hallmark of a truly educated person. This is your greatest superpower.
And if you optimize your own agency, you become a beacon for others—showing what’s possible in a world that values human agency for everyone.
Thank you, and bon voyage.