Sydney+W’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

When I asked myself, “What kind of America do I want to grow old in?” I laughed. I thought the prompt was particularly ironic considering the fact that a few months ago I didn’t want to live to see my senior year. Wow, what a shock. No need to act surprised. Unless you didn’t read my muckraker, which I would expect considering that not one person in our generation gives a damn about how other people feel about themselves, our generation cares about what other people think of us.

Being suicidal feels like reaching out into nothingness. You look fine. You act fine. You tell people you feel “fine”. But inside you keep thinking, sometimes hoping, that today will be the day you cut vertically, or that you step into oncoming traffic, or that you walk into the ocean until it’s too deep to feel the sand in between your toes and it’s too cold to feel anything at all. Some of you may know how this feels, some of you may not. The important piece of me cracking my thoughts open so you all can peer inside like I’m some exhibit at a museum is so maybe you can get some semblance of what I’ve felt these past few months. This may be selfish, and honestly, I don’t particularly care if you decide to leave the room right this moment for a ten-minute long bathroom break so you don’t have to listen to my “nonsense”, but if you decide to stay, then listen.

We have grown up in the era of anonymous comments and offensive sarcasm. Where telling someone to kill themselves is a suitable form of entertainment and joking about someone’s insecurities is “just sarcasm. Get over it.” People can’t expose their feelings anymore out of fear of being made into a joke, and it’s a valid fear. There are people in this room and at this school who take pleasure in turning other people’s insecurities into entertainment, and they’re the reason why people can’t branch out. We, as a generation, have lost that sense of empathy, we’ve lost motivation to care for our peers and now every conversation is superficial because people don’t want to expose parts of themselves that they know will get made fun of. We guard our secrets with walls topped with barbed wire, protecting ourselves from any genuine interaction, preventing us from being able to open up to each other. We are a generation of cowards. Too terrified to open up and put ourselves out there. The most insecure of us are the most hurtful towards others. We hold our innermost thoughts inside by lashing out at others, hindering any future conversations of value. Rather than putting ourselves out there and growing stronger because of it, we hide behind insults and cruel jokes. We put our peers down for the sake of seeming “cool”, and make ourselves feel better by making jokes out of people’s insecurities.

We hold no regard for how our peers feel, exchanging empathy for superiority. Desperately trying to elevate ourselves above our colleagues, we grasp for strengths while projecting others weaknesses. Our generation puts others down whilst attempting to promote our own image, rather than having genuine relationships with people because life isn’t worth living if everything is meaningless. While sometimes I don’t want to live long enough to see the America you all will grow old in, I know that as long as human interaction is stunted by this egotistical need for superiority, our society won’t be worth living long enough to see from a rocking chair in a boring, old persons home. The intricate web of relationships throughout the human race is slowly deteriorating as people are raised to become more and more calloused as generations progress; we’ve lost the value of caring about one another enough to at least attempt to understand or sympathize with what they’re going through.

Opening up like I have today is a difficult task to overcome, to say the least. Standing in front of you today and explaining the basic inner workings of my mind felt like I was being dissected by inexperienced Bioscience kids with kiddy scissors, and yet I’m still here because this topic is vital to the survival of our society. If people can’t be vulnerable, then they will not branch out and civilization will become static, stuck in a trench of unoriginality and superficiality. So, if I can come up here today and bare my thoughts, then we, as a generation, should be able to stop putting our ego above people and care enough to listen to one another.