speakingspeaking

What is up, Class of 2026!

My name is Ariv Gupta, and I have spent the last four years having a blast. To our faculty, staff, and my brilliant peers, it has been the honor of my life to walk from childhood into adulthood with you.

I still remember my first day on the Hill. I was homesick… for about twenty minutes, and then I had a conversation with my roommate Jason. Somehow we meandered our way into talking about the three-body problem, because that's just the kind of stuff that happens here.

The three-body problem is a question in classical physics. If you take three objects, each pulling on the other with gravitational force, and put them in a vacuum — what happens after you set the system in motion?

Now let's consider the same problem in a different system: the human condition. Since we're engineers, and we've spent the last four years learning to solve hard problems on the spot without the use of external resources, we might as well show our loved ones what we've got. And we'll start with first principles. We each have three bodies of our own. Our mind — its hunger for knowledge, for problem solving, for meaning making. Our body — the physical thing we live inside of, that we feed and rest and push and sometimes completely neglect. And our world — the career we have and its impact, the bread we get and the people we feed with it.

Every single day we wake up and try to juggle all three with only two hands.

Now, UCLA has done a remarkable job setting us up with some great initial conditions. Our minds have been sharpened. Our worldly prospects are bright. And thanks to the Hill, we have definitely gotten our steps in. But! There is a fourth body we've overlooked. One that no class prepared us for and no GPA can measure. And that is our heart.

Not the organ that pumps blood — please take care of this too — but the place we go to find out how we feel. Research says there are up to 87 distinct human emotions. And yet when someone asks how we are doing, most of us say good, or alright, or fine. We've spent so much time thinking that I believe we forget to feel.

If I asked everyone what 2 + 2 was, you'd confidently tell me four. But if I asked you what it meant to be happy, or succeed, we'd all say something completely different — and I'd rather not find out, I've seen what happens when engineers disagree online. The point is, success is a feeling, not a well-defined phrase. And it is all too easy to create a life in which "I am successful" is true, but "I feel successful" is false. And I'd argue the latter is much more important.

Let me tell you about two people that I feel are the definition of success. My mom and dad came from India with a couple thousand dollars to their name. My dad put himself through his master's degree teaching classes and working whatever odd jobs he could find — including one at a laundromat. My mom worked at Home Depot. The sacrifice they made to get me here is incalculable. And for a long time I thought the best way to honor their sacrifice was to outwork everyone. To push harder, achieve more, and never settle.

And yes I still believe this to a degree (pun intended). But we do a disservice to the people who paved the trails we tread if we run through our lives without ever stopping to enjoy the mountains. They did not work hard so we could be miserable. They struggled so we could smell fresh air and listen to the bees and experience the world at 1x speed.

We have all been given something my parents didn't have: the luxury of asking how we feel. The space to push the envelope not just on what we build, but on the depth of emotion we feel while we are here. That is not a betrayal of their struggle. That is honoring it.

Physicists and engineers spent centuries trying to solve the three body problem, and they concluded it is mathematically impossible. The only way to know how it evolves is to let it unfold.

And the same goes for us. The only way to know how our lives will unfold, is to live them. So we might as well have fun while we do it, and juggle our priorities with a smile. We'll drop things, but we'll pick them up again. There is no right way to live. The only way is yours.

Let's stop trying to divine our trajectory, or perfectly predict our orbit. There is no justifying our place on Earth. Because we are already here.

So get up, get wild, and feel something.

You already have everything you need.

I want to tell you right here, right now, that I’m not going to give you an oratory intro. None of that “my dad is a Michelin Star chef” or “my mom is a popstar” because as much as I wish that was true, my dad is vegan, and my mom is, well, uhm, hi mom, a sweet singer. So yeah, let’s try something else.

All of us come from someone, most of us humans, others storks, but there’s something all of us have in common, something Reddit user u/naisimar illustrates quite well…

“My parents are boring. I will never be like them” (u/naisimar).

We’ve all been brought up to not be our parents, to do what they couldn’t. We strive to be recognized as “unique” and “special”–we fear becoming our benchmark for ordinary–our parents. We hate the normal. In fact, we argue it’s overrated.

And that’s my concern.

Whether it’s forcing ourselves to order the quirkiest dish on a menu, not settling for 2nd place, or trying to write a creative intro to a speech out of my necessity to be different, we can’t settle for ordinary.

Searching for our abnormal has brought us to discount our normal.

Now more than ever, as the world is returning to a new normal, it is imperative we shift our mentality towards the value of being so.

We must normalize being normal.

So first, let's look at the causes. Then, let’s look at the effects. Then the solutions.

I told you I was unique.

And it’s all Charles Darwin’s fault. According to his Origin of Species, “the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself” (Darwin). He didn’t do it that way but I thought it was cooler. If my elementary school hero says get better, adapt, have better qualities–that’s how you’ll survive–I get it. We’ve been raised in a society that believes the fittest survive. And we all think that the fittest is us. That’s why in 2017, researchers from the Department of Psychology in Korea found that “when asked to evaluate their abilities, most people say they are better than average… [that] is statistically impossible” (Young-Hoon Kim, Heewon Kwon, Chi-Yue Chiu). We fear being normal so much that we automatically place ourselves above it, because if the fittest survive, then it has to be us.

This “illusory superiority” leads us into the well-known rat race, which ends in a cataclysm of comparisons, where we compare ourselves to “normal” and think we must do more.

According to Psychology Today, over “10 percent of our thoughts involve comparisons of some kind” (psychologytoday.com). And nowhere is this more prevalent than in my generation. In a their 2021 study, Facebook–Meta reported “more than 40% of Instagram users who reported feeling “unattractive”... [and] a quarter of the teens who reported feeling “not good enough” said the feeling [began] on Instagram” (The Wall Street Journal). What we see is society is autonomously able to organize itself as an implicit, social hierarchy. We may think we’re the most secure people in the world, but the moment we look at everyone else, and I mean the curated, algorithmically defined everyone else, our self-pessimism is perpetuated–who am I to be normal, when everyone else is so much better than me.

Okay, so how do we solve this problem? By considering the harms, of course!

Our first harm arises when we begin to sacrifice our values for our reputation. Or, as Psychology Professor Dan Ariely puts it in his book Predictably Irrational, “sacrifice personal utility [for] reputational utility” (Ariely). That’s why The International Center for Academic Integrity reported in 2015 that “95% of [70,000] students admit[] to cheating” (ICAI). “[They’d] cheat on a 10-point quiz because the[ir] quest for perfection overrides their integrity” (Wright). Let’s take convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, as an example. Her company developed a revolutionary blood-testing method that didn’t quite work. Holmes knew this, but by the time the world noticed, she'd raked in billions, and misdiagnosed millions.

When we don’t meet the societally generated benchmark for normal, we misdiagnose ourselves with incompetence. Take Kathryn DeWitt, student at the University of Pennsylvania, as an example. When transitioning from high school to college, the new normal became “best in the world.” People would attend class wearing full makeup. She had acne. Even the photos they posted to Instagram made their lives look better, and hers, worse. With her rigorous workweek, changing exam schedule, and growing insecurity, she reasoned, if I can’t fit in, if I can’t even be normal, then I don’t deserve to be alive. And she is not alone. In a society where suicidal ideation rates amongst people like me have risen by 200%, this decision shouldn’t be the norm! New York Times author Julie Scelfo tells us “these cultural dynamics of perfectionism… have [built] adolescents who are [hyper]-focused on success … [they] don’t know how to fail” (Scelfo). And I’m one of those adolescents as well.

Growing up in the Bay Area, I was conditioned to believe success meant create a company, attain enlightenment, and do a bit of philanthropy in between. So when quarantine hit, rather spend time with my family, I created an account on LinkedIn. And rather than play with my brother, I’d scroll. And I’d scroll, and I’d scroll, and I’d scroll, and I’d start to have these moments–I’m too normal, I’m too average, I’m not enough. I told my parents this for months on end. But so what? I didn’t solve enough math problems or cure enough cancer–was it my fault? The way I live and the values I hold are fundamentally different from the person in front of me. How can I feel like I’m not enough when my best friend lands an internship, wins a competition, or just succeeds? Enough, normal, unique–these are all words built upon my assumptions of what the people around me define them to be. I may never be enough. We may never be enough. But that’s fine.

Now, I won’t pretend to come up with creative solutions to a problem this abstract, but I have some suggestions. And they revolve around the Sanskrit word Mudita, which means “pure joy unadulterated by self-interest” (Wikipedia). There are many ways to practice Mudita, but here are two.

Number 1: Appreciate

“Be thankful for what you have, you’ll end up having more. [Focus] on what you don’t have, you will never, ever, have enough” (Winfrey). Oprah said that, so we all best believe it. Let’s start to appreciate the little things, the things we take for granted. For me it’s parents, a habit of running, home. What are yours? Use them. Nataly Kogan, author of “Happier Now” reccomends writing down three good things about your day or making a rule to say thank you at least once. Let’s stop looking for happiness out there and learn to find it right here.

Number 2: Celebrate

If COVID’s taught us one thing, it’s that normal is kinda NICE. So let’s not wait for the next pandemic, natural disaster, or war to realize what we have right now is worth celebrating. Celebrate your victories, small or large! And that doesn’t mean stop trying to create the next big thing, get into that college, or buy the next Twitter; all I ask is you don’t let that strife turn toxic and lead to your, and other people’s, demise. And we can start right now. Competitors, at the end of this round, whether you do better or worse than normal, celebrate your message, your advocacy, and your competition. Without you, I wouldn’t be here.

This speech arose from a conversation I had with my dad in the car. He told me how lucky he was to live a life with food, water, shelter–with kids like me. He said “Ariv reach as high as you want, just don’t forget the beauty in this. In a normal, happy, healthy, life.” As much as it may seem so, it’s not so boring after all. Remember, we’re coming out of a pandemic. So take a second to step back, breathe, take yourself a little less seriously.

Because at the end of the day…

It’s okay to be ordinary.

It’s okay to be normal.

It’s okay not to have a real conclusion to your speech.

But no it’s okay–it’s okay to be you.

You are enough.

You really are.