David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest (which, one day, I might even finish) gave a fantastic speech to graduating US students. It’s long but well worth reading:

I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

[Via Metafilter]