Happy Friday!
Graduation season (and wedding season!) is upon us. With these ceremonies come the opportunity to reflect on our own ambitions, hopes, and dreams—and to offer unsolicited advice for those about to embark on a new life chapter. This week, a handful of Quartz editors and writers offered guidance to graduates that we wish we’d had straight out of school. Among the gems: Don’t worry if your first job is terrible. Do invest in a blazer. Don’t go overboard at IKEA. (That last one probably applies to newlyweds too, actually.)
I found a gem by reading to the end of this revelatory conversation between New York Magazine’s film and TV critic, Matt Zoller-Seitz, and Damon Lindelof, the creator of Lost and The Leftovers. Lindelof acknowledged experiencing some backlash when viewers have sensed he’s making up a show’s plot as it goes along.
“Of course we’re making it up as we go along,” he said. “It’s possible to both be making things up as you go along and have a plan at the same time… Look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m making things up as I go along and I have a plan.’ And guess what, you just told the truth…Anybody who has a plan for their life and everything is going according to that plan? Please, please, let’s have a chat. I want to know your secret. Because that’s just not life. I mean, that’s not the way I see life.”
That’s not the way I see life either. I’ve been winging it with a pretty broad flight plan since college, and so far it’s gone okay (with a lot of luck, too). If we’re myopically focused on a prescribed path, we might be blind to a new opportunity or some interesting fork in the road.
I think the key to navigating this successfully has to do with knowing, deep down, what kind of work satisfies you and feeds you, what you want to express, and what you really value. I’ve actually written down broad answers to the questions like these in a notebook: What are you really interested in? What are you happiest doing? What kind of people do you want to be around? What’s your ideal workplace look like? What about your home? You might find what you’re looking for in a wide array of unexpected places.
And most “grown-ups” are winging it too. I read accounts this week of actor Cary Grant, astronaut Neil Armstrong, and author Neil Gaiman all experiencing some variety of imposter syndrome, or, as Quartz’s Thu-Huong Ha put it, ”that constant feeling that you’re about to be revealed as a total fraud.” Gaiman described Armstrong telling him, at an event for artists and scientists, that he felt he didn’t deserve to be there.
“I felt a bit better,” said Gaiman. “Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.”
More good news: That liberal arts degree might save you from the robots! Kai-Fu Lee, a famous venture capitalist and former Google and Microsoft executive, is a futurist who is betting big on artificial intelligence. In an interview with Quartz’s editor-in-chief, Kevin Delaney, Lee described a rapidly approaching dystopian future in which half of all workers are displaced by robots. Take this with a grain of salt, because Lee is heavily invested in AI, but he predicted some of the first jobs to go will be those in finance. (“I don’t trade with humans anymore,” he said.) So who will be safe? Artists!
“Art and beauty is very hard to replicate with AI,” said Lee. “Given AI is more objective, analytical, data driven, maybe it’s time for some of us to switch to the humanities, liberal arts, and beauty.”
Quartz artificial intelligence reporter Dave Gershgorn (who is human) has not resigned himself to Lee’s most dismal predictions, but he does agree that in our automated world, the creative fields may be more stable than our parents could have possibly imagined. As Dave put it, “Human authenticity is going to be valuable for the foreseeable future.” Here’s hoping!
Winging it, but with eyeliner. I will be a bridesmaid this weekend, and want nothing more (beyond, you know, for my friends to have a great wedding and happy marriage) than for my eye makeup to vaguely resemble that of model and actor Emily Ratajkowski in Cannes this week.
My beauty-expert friend told me the secret ingredient for making smokey, winged, Sophia Loren-ish eye makeup endure is a good base, so I’ve purchased a tube of NARS smudge-proof eyeshadow primer, and am hoping for the best.
But really, if I feel jittery while standing near that altar, it’s not EmRata I will channel. It’s Susan Sarandon, who has once again set the red carpet on fire with her beatific smile, enviable cleavage, smoking sunglasses, and super-chill vibes.
I leave you with a message from a friend’s fortune cookie on Tuesday night: “Knowledge makes a living. Wisdom makes a life.”
Have a great weekend!
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Quartz editor Caitlin Hu was recently at the Venice Biennale, where she discovered a recipe for flourishing during long days of studying the relationship between yacht ownership and the art market. This version of the spritz liscio, or ”straight” spritz, contains dry white wine, a splash of club soda, a single green olive, and a slice of lemon. It’s a twist on the basic white wine spritzer, but finding a bottle of non-sparkling glera wine—made of the grapes traditionally used for Prosecco—gives this drink a green and floral feeling.
“It’s perfect for hot days and doing multiple openings without falling down,” Caitlin says. “But more importantly, you can drink a million of them in a typical Venetian bar crawl, with a snack at each osteria.”