5 Things Not to Miss
1
2026 graduation gift guide
With graduation season upon us, I put together a guide to help you find a great gift for the student in your life.
2
Terrific books for a graduate
If you love to give books, I also have recommendations for a book to give a new graduate.
3
The days are long, but the years are short
Graduation is a milestone that reminds me of my Secret of Adulthood: “The days are long, but the years are short.” Of all the lines I’ve written, it’s one that has resonated deeply with readers. Watch this short video that tells the story of the moment I had that realization.
4
Practical advice for graduates
A few years ago, I gave the commencement address at my daughter’s high-school graduation. Afterward, I wrote down all the practical advice I would have included if I could have fit it into the speech.
5
Life in the Open-Door phase
Last fall, I joined Kim and Penn Holderness’s podcast to talk about my “Open-Door” phase (my rebranding of the “Empty-Nest” phase). I shocked them a bit with my answer about how often to expect your kids to check in with you.
INTERVIEW
Jamie Metzl
Jamie Metzl is leading technology futurist and the author of multiple books exploring the big-picture implications of AI and other revolutionary technologies, including the bestsellers Hacking Darwin and Superconvergence, as well as the novels Eternal Sonata and Genesis Code. His new book, The AI Ten Commandments describes his process of collaborating with GPT-5 to generate ten principles—distilled from the full recorded history of our species and all of our various religious, spiritual, moral, and ethical traditions—for how we can live together with greater peace and happiness. Like me, Jamie is also a New Yorker originally from Kansas City, and I have known him and his family a loooooong time.
Q: Can you suggest something we might try to help ourselves to become happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative?
Plugging out of technology is such hackneyed advice that we can lose sight of how essential it is. I’m a huge optimist about the potential for our various technologies and a big user of AI and other tools, but if we rely too much on these capabilities we run the danger of losing ourselves. I advise people to live on the proverbial technological spectrum. Have defined times and spaces of your life where you are completely apart from technology and invested in the best part of realizing your core humanity, however you may define that. You might call this a digital sabbath. Also have times where you dive deeply into learning as much as you can about our new capabilities, playing around to see what’s possible, and exploring how these tools might empower, inspire, and serve you. We humans have co-evolved with our technologies for at least a million years since our ancestors controlled fire and will keep doing do for the foreseeable future, but we need to continually invest in the parts of ourselves that we value most. To thrive in a world of peak technology, we must continually strive to be peak humans.
Q: Do you have a Secret of Adulthood? A lesson you’ve learned from life the hard way; something you’d tell your younger self?
I’ve learned the hard way that life has ups and downs. Every up is followed by a down just like every down, if you keep at it, will eventually be followed by an up. I ran for Congress over two decades ago and drove myself into the ground campaigning 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for a year. After I lost, I felt like I was falling into a hole. The right thing, in retrospect, would have been to tell myself that life is a sine curve with ups and downs and that the particular down at that time was just a natural part of being human. Instead, I tried to force myself out of the doldrum, which, in retrospect, wasn’t healthy at all. Years later, I gave an impromptu talk on this experience as part of Armenia Fuckup Night. That talk remains one of the favorite talks I’ve ever given, even though I give lots of keynotes at massive technology and other conferences.
Q: What simple habit boosts your happiness or energy?
I’m a natural optimist so I often can’t help myself from being optimistic, but optimism is a key for me to most everything. While part of an optimistic orientation in innate, it’s also a learned habit. You can start by greeting the day when you first open your eyes. For whatever it’s worth I also have a huge mug of steaming hot (single source, dark!) chocolate every morning (here’s the recipe, as I shared on the Joe Rogan podcast), exercise and check in on my mom every day, have close friends of all ages (one of my closest friends, the artist Rita Blitt, is a spritely 94), and try to keep learning new things and exploring new ways of being.
Q: Is there a particular motto that you’ve found very helpful?
One of my favorites, since high school, is by Henry David Thoreau: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now build the foundations under them.” If a quote I included in my high school yearbook in 1986 Kansas City still feels as relevant 40 years later, that’s a pretty good sign.
Q: Has a book ever changed your life – if so, which one and why?
I don’t know if one single book has changed my life, but the combination of my favorites collectively has. These include Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi, Love Poems by Yehuda Amichai, and Dream Work by Mary Oliver. For me, happiness cannot be a form of enforced blindness. It’s about looking at the world—with all if its beauty, majesty, horror, and imperfections—with open eyes and choosing to fill your life, and though you the world, with as much light as possible.
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