Dear Daughters,

A friend recently asked what advice I was going to give the graduating seniors of 2024, perhaps assuming I’d be writing a letter like this one with my newly minted college graduate in mind. (Congratulations, btw, to dear daughter #2! Go Dukes!)

The truth is, I hadn’t thought much about it till she asked. I’ve had occasion lately to reflect on the sheer number of problems for which I don’t have any helpful insights to share. It’s a humbling recognition (especially for a Dad blogger!), and it points to what may be the best overarching lesson I can offer you: Despite the stuff that gets said in Hallmark cards and commencement addresses, there are times when life is just going to be hard. You’re going to have to muddle your way through it like the rest of us.

Not exactly inspiring stuff, I know.

The more I thought about it, though, the more another piece of advice came to mind—a companion to the sobering reflection above. That advice is simply this: You gotta help.

You’re coming of age at a time when we humans need to find solutions to a wide range of problems—from curing diseases to restoring peace to managing new technologies to creating new opportunities to reducing inequities to protecting the air, food, and water upon which all of our lives ultimately depend.

It’s a lot. And even as we’re working on all of that, we also need to rebuild trust in a variety of institutions that help hold our society together. We need to build trust in governments, in social service agencies, in businesses, in schools, and in journalists, to name just a few.

Such trust is essential because no single sector of society can hope to solve any of the really big challenges I just mentioned on its own. The work of building a better future will require everyone—including governments, businesses, journalists, and the social sector—to work together better.

It’s hard to know where to begin to tackle such a complex set of challenges. So maybe we should just start with this: You gotta help.

Wherever you go and whatever you do next, you gotta help. You don’t have to cure cancer or win a Nobel prize. You don’t have to start a new company or launch a social movement. But you do have to give more than you take, play fair, speak with honesty, and act with integrity. You do have to build up more than you break down. You do have to do more good than harm.

You gotta help.

And you can and should demand that those around you do the same. To the organizations you go to work for, you should say “you gotta help,” no matter what sort of organization it is. To the people you go to work with, you should say “we gotta help,” and you should pitch in right beside them. And to the organizations and people you find who refuse to help—who do more harm than good, who take more than they give—you should say “you have to change” or just “goodbye.”

Building a better future is not your job alone, but it is your job. Because building a better future—meeting community needs, solving society’s problems, and taking care of one another—is everyone’s job. That work is precisely what communities and societies and even businesses are for. And, to a large degree, that’s precisely what the people who make up communities and societies and businesses are for, too.

We were all put here to help.

To some, I realize, this may sound like idealistic talk. I can imagine someone out there grumbling “yeah, we’re never going to get everyone to sit around and sing Kumbaya together.” I can imagine others noting with slightly cynical sneers that people just aren’t wired for putting service before selfishness, or for doing what’s right over doing whatever we like.

Maybe so. But I’d submit that the whole history of functioning human societies has turned on our collective ability to follow what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” These angels whisper phrases like “love your neighbor as yourself” and “do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

They tell us we gotta help.

And it doesn’t really matter what our particular religious or political beliefs are. This is not a matter of being Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Taoist or Humanist or Communist or Atheist or any other “-ist” we might come up with. It’s a matter of accepting the fundamental demand at the heart of all morality—the demand that we each look out for more than just ourselves, that we also take care of each other.

The thought I would offer today is that accepting this demand may well be the most world-changing choice any of us individually can make. It’s the choice to aim higher and work to be bigger and better than our own sometimes selfish selves. It’s the choice to hold ourselves—and, by extension, our companies and our organizations and our governments—to a standard that says, whatever else, “you gotta help.”

To each and every one of the graduates out there, from this year or any other, my best advice boils down to this: you gotta be ready to muddle through, and you gotta help. It might even turn out that doing the latter will go a long way toward enabling you to succeed at the former.

It is not your job alone to save the world. But it is your job—it is all of our job—to follow the better angels of our nature, to do what we can to save each other, to make the world a little better, a little truer, a little more just, and a little more genuinely beautiful.

We don’t have to have all of the answers. We do have to help.

Congratulations, graduates! Good luck, godspeed, and let’s do this!

Love,
Dad