In 1997, on what I imagine to have been a beautiful June day full of hope and wonder, writer Mary Schmich penned a column for the Chicago Tribune offering some whimsical advice to the college graduates of that year. The column was titled “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young.” The following year, Baz Luhrman put that column to music in “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen),” a slightly melancholy and carefree song which has garnered millions of YouTube listens.
Here’s a snapshot of the song, to give you a feel of its playful, if sappy, tone:
Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ’99: Wear Sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
For Luhrman’s audience of graduates, an exciting world of possibilities lies ahead — an idealistic neverland where you should “keep your old love letters” and “throw away your old bank statements,” where you should “remember compliments you receive” and “forget the insults.”
Would that life were so sweet and platitudinous!
Fast-forward nearly 15 years after Luhrman’s song debuted to today — and enter a failing school in a rough and run-down Brooklyn neighborhood. There, you’ll find a 12th grade English teacher who has a very different kind of advice to offer to his students who are about to enter the real world: “Rule 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it!”
Thanks to a teacher friend of mine, who found herself substitute teaching in his classroom a few days ago, I have in my lap a sheet of paper with the word “RULES” in big block black letters emblazoned across the top. Below that are 13 rules, which are unconsciously hilarious in their bitter portrayal of life — the first of the 13 rules was mentioned above: Life is not fair. This stark 8 x 11 sheet of paper, with its three holes down its left side, my friend informs me, was posted prominently on the wall of the teacher’s classroom.
Like Luhrman’s song, this teacher’s rules — let’s call the teacher Mr. Martinez — seek to instill a certain kind of wisdom in the youth.
While Luhrman’s feel-good song is studded with motivational commands like “Enjoy your body,” “Sing,” “Dance,” “Stretch,” and “You are not as fat as you imagine,” Mr. Martinez has more to worry about than his students’ self-esteem. Many of his students won’t graduate from high school, nor will they make it to college, after all. When Luhrman tells his audience of future yuppies, “Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly,” Mr. Martinez thinks, “Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel ‘so good’ about yourself.”
And while Luhrman idealistically suggests that you “Do one thing every day that scares you,” that could spell real trouble for Mr. Martinez’s students, whose brushes with gang violence and the police are a regular occurrence.
Luhrman seeks to comfort his audience, who are fretting about entering the real world (of paralegal drudgery) and are anxious about what the uncertain future holds for them (probably lots of Yoga). “Don’t worry about the future,” Luhrman assures them. “Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.” Mr. Martinez, meanwhile, tells it like it is: “Rule 3: You will not make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a BMW until you earn both.”
Indeed. Mr. Martinez’s fifth rule impresses the difficulties of financial reality upon his students. “Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity,” he writes. He then goes on to invoke a cold, hard fact of capitalism: that everyone has to start somewhere. “Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it an opportunity.”
When it comes to personal responsibility, Luhrman is, as expected, as lax as a Rastafarian pothead: “Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.”
Mr. Martinez? One moment. Let me consult the rule sheet. Ah, yes. Rule 8 is salient here. “Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This does NOT bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.” There are no trophies for trying in the real world. And try telling a judge that your decision to rob the 7-11 at gunpoint was “half chance.”
Hey, man — chill out — that’s Luhrman’s creed: “Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.”
Welcome to the real world, dude, is Mr. Martinez’s advice: “Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.” Nobody cares about your “Nike sneakers, bling bling, tattoos, and hair.”
But both Luhrman and Mr. Martinez agree on one point: that the youth ought to value and respect their parents. Luhrman sincerely urges his listeners to “Get to know your parents; you’ll never know when they’ll be gone for good.” Mr. Martinez, for his part, matter-of-factly informs his students, “Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you think you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.”
You should “behave respectfully” to adults. And to the teacher, that means that “If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.”
Luhrman concludes, “Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”
Mr. Martinez has zero misgivings about the quality of his advice. His final words are as unrelenting as his opening remark about life’s bitter unfairness: “If you can read this — Thank a teacher! If you are reading it in English — THANK a U.S. veteran or soldier!”
Perhaps advice, like youth, truly is wasted on the young. But for those few students in Mr. Martinez’s class who, in the coming weeks, may hear some good news from any colleges they applied to, they’ll have their teacher’s tough love in part to thank for it.
Below is a full list of the RULES:
Rule 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel “so good” about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a BMW until you earn both
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it an opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you think you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This does NOT bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs. In real life people care about other things than Nike sneakers, bling bling, tattoos, and hair.
Rule 11: You will find that you start to be treated with respect and treated like an adult when you behave respectfully and act like an adult
Rule 12: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Rule 13: If you think your grades are not a reflection of how much money you will make in your career, you are wrong. Statistics point to the fact that the higher the grades, the bigger the opportunities in life and, in turn, the better your career and your salary.
Emily Esfahani Smith, the managing editor of the Hoover Institution journal Defining Ideas, is an editor at the blog Ricochet.com and a senior editor at Smith and Kraus, the largest publisher of trade theater books in the USA.