Name: 【TEDx】We are nothing (and that is beautiful): Alok Vaid-Menon at TEDxMiddlebury
Uploaded: 2015-01-02T15:31:44.000Z
Duration: 18 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

when you were nothing but a name and a dot on the map at the front of the hall?

Remember when our parents dropped us off in those rooms too small for all of our expectations

Remember when you told me that you weren’t sure but you were pretty sure

that you were gonna declare a double major in Philosophy and English

because you cried the first time you read The Perks of Being a Wallflower

and we both share a sacred and unquenchable lust for bad science fiction?

Remember when we both thought we were going to find ourselves, changed the world

and all of the other slogans we memorized from the view books,

the ones that we stitched to our throats when they asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up?

so when you exchanged t-shirt for j-crews,

so when you accepted that job offer at an investment bank because

you swore you were just going to dismantle the system from within because

you were just different from the rest of them.

I wondered at what point we become the tucked in shirt,

You, whose love of learning far surpassed the stickers your teachers adorned your homework with

You, who could not fall asleep that night in debate camp when you read Marx for the first time

because the world just finally made sense again

You, whose creativity refused to be disciplined

You, who sacrificed dream for diploma, revolution for resume

and that factory which tries to produce profit out of every potential prophet

where change falls from hearts into pockets

because we gotta make that endowment rocket.

Small liberal arts college degree becomes a fancy way of saying

“can spend 8 hours designing PowerPoint slides,”

or “will sacrifice all promises for promotion,”

or “can seduce potential business clients by quoting classic literature I read in college.”

So what if the best way to dominate a world is to pretend that you are saving it?

So what if this education was really about teaching us how to become so ignorant that we forgot how to think for ourselves?

You, the twenty something year old idealist gone corporate

in your first suit throwing theory at a wall that will swallow you up and spit you back out on the street,

discharged, like the cold hard cash of an ATM machine.

Your heartbeat reduced to a series of transactions.

I almost thought that when you hugged me goodbye you would ask me for a receipt,

proof of purchase for a friendship you only consumed when it made cents for your career trajectory.

I’m sorry I did not make the cut for the walking resume you mistake as a body,

because I want to believe in the power of a creativity undisciplined:

the time we saw her smile, saw our first eclipse, read our first book,

The time and space before friendship got postponed by deadlines,

before future was segregated into interviews and internships.

like the dot on the map from freshman year?

What if we both cried when our parents left us but we did not tell each other?

What if I am crying that you are leaving me but I will not tell you

because I no longer have the market value to make you listen

that I think you are worth more than any salary increase that they will give you,

that I do not think that your heartbeat can be transcribed on a spreadsheet of numbers,

Wondering what you could’ve been before you sold out.

In the spirit…in the spirit of full disclosure, I am here to recruit you.

This is not a recruitment interview like the ones your career centers have prepared you for.

I do not care where you went to school nor what you majored in.

These things are no longer relevant in a world

where we are losing some of our most creative and dynamic minds to the epidemic of success.

This is not the crisis that they will tell you about on the news,

that the economy is tanking, the world is at war.

The government isn’t broken. It’s working.

Our universities are not broken. They are perfect.

Our generation is not apathetic. It is flourishing.

This means that you are not actually an innovator, a leader,

an exceptional student or all of the other medals they have placed around your neck.

These are merely accomplishments you’ve been taught your entire life that define yourself worth.

Should you desire to be successful you will not actually bring human rights for all,

eliminate poverty and global warming and fix Congress.

Should you go in with these mindsets chances are you will fail in the same ways all the generations before you have failed.

The truth is the key to changing the world is

finding a way to fail to live up to its expectation.

and you could call me a fashionista, activist, general provocateur,

but I prefer to call myself a professional failure.

Someone who, at least my mom reminds me, was destined for all of the riches of the world,

You see, I grew up in a comfortable middle class Indian family,

where the expectation was that I grow up and become some fancy schmancy academic.

With two PhD parents, the bar was always set high.

I remember getting chastised for talking on the phone rather than reading the New York Times.

I soon learned that the secret to legitimacy was finding a scholar who had written about something.

This is how I discovered Critical Youtube Studies. It’s real.

It wasn’t so much that my parents pressured me to succeed;

You see, this was part of our immigration story.

To move to this country and not really challenge any of its rules,

but rather beat everyone else at their own game,

which goes to say that from an early age, it seemed like success was the only way to justify my parents’ journey across the ocean.

But when I got into Stanford, my parents weren’t really that excited for me.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TEDx】We are nothing (and that is beautiful): Alok Vaid-Menon at TEDxMiddlebury

awkward

people

break

world