We are not alone

To the Class of 2023’s most distinguished graduates:

Strap in; the rest of your lives start today, and yours will be a particularly bumpy ride.

Because “when I was your age,” aliens weren’t real, the universe wasn’t a two-dimensional holographic projection, artificial intelligence was confined to the cinema, and there were cinemas.

That was then — on the date of my own graduation, long before you were born, in the heady summer days of pre-Nine-Eleven 2001. A few months later, Earth would be fundamentally, forever, and irreparably changed as the forces of war reshuffled the globe and the advent of high-speed internet ushered in the New World Order into which you were born.

Yet even in the midst of all that chaos and rampaging societal transformation, at least aliens weren’t real.

On June 11, 2023, career intelligence officer David Grush appeared on cable news network “News Nation” to disclose the existence of a specific program to retrieve “non-human origin technical vehicles” — i.e., “spacecraft” — “that have either landed or crashed.” To top it all off, he confirmed that the United States was in possession of “bodies.”

Extraterrestrial bodies? Not necessarily. “[M]aybe they’re coming from a different physical dimension as described in quantum mechanics. We know there are extra dimensions due to high-energy particle collisions, et cetera, and there’s a theoretical framework to explain that,” Grush said in an interview addressing his whistleblower complaint.

For days, I kept waiting for the government to issue some opaque denial of this fantastical report with allusion to some top-secret explanation.

I kept waiting for the media to apologize for so poorly vetting this crank — you know, a 14-year active duty Air Force veteran and former lead of the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) portfolio for the Department of Defense’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

I kept waiting for some pop physicist to debunk his claims with reference to the impossibility of intergalactic space travel due to the physical limitations of a lightspeed commute.

And when no such response materialized, it was how my sister ended a phone call that drove home the point. “OK, talk to ya next week. Isn’t it weird aliens are real now?”

This column is a waste of your time; little of the world which existed two decades ago is transferable to your experience now, and your young adult lives will be as different from mine as were your teenage years.  Remote learning during a pandemic? Communal identities forming around not ZIP codes, but TikTok’s algorithmic applications?

Still, it can just as easily be said that the world three years from now may be as different from today as is this world from the one that existed 20 years ago. Change happens faster and faster; it’s as if we’re all graduating 2023 together.

So rather than chart a course for your future, I’ll instead offer a few suggestions about what to hold onto from your past as tools in your existential survival kit. I can’t tell you what to expect, but I can tell you what prepared me for the things I didn’t expect.

First, trust that there will always be Albany County.

From the urban vibrance of our capital city to the peaceful forests of the Hilltowns, from the open fields of New Scotland/Bethlehem/Guilderland to the suburban expedience of Colonie, from the peaceful remoteness of Rensselaerville and Coeymans to the post-industrial renaissance along the Green Island/Watervliet/Cohoes riverbank, this county has all the accouterments of a life well lived.

Good school districts, scenic drives, affordable real estate, world-class cuisine, and convenient transit by highway, air, and rail are all just a stone’s throw from any front door. Sure, there may only be two-and-a-half nice days per year in upstate New York, but it’s just as likely that the entire planet will be climate controlled in the next few years as it is that the oceans will submerge us all. (A betting man would wager that the global thermostat has already been invented and we’re just waiting for the aliens to show us how to work the dial.)

So keep your hometown in mind as you explore the great “Out There.” Whether your future takes you to St. Louis or another dimension, there’s no shame in realizing, as I did, that people are freaking weird wherever you go. Albany will forever be your type of weird.

Second, don’t get distracted by the inevitable mass awareness that, if everything’s possible, then nothing’s real. Is the linear timeline by which you marched from kindergarten through senior year real if time can be traversed?

Does anything mean anything anymore if the scientific community is coalescing around the statistical likelihood that we live in a virtual simulation? Or, to borrow a more pointed question: “You think that’s air you’re breathing now?”

Tell your soon-to-materialize physics major college roommate that he can wax poetic about wave function collapse and quantum entanglement on his own time. Because there are a few things that are real, that do exist, regardless of who or what is observing the electrons zinging through twin slits.

The sum total of these things is “you.”

What can’t be denied is who you were, where you’re from, and the people who love you. Yes, Mr.-or-Ms. Philosopher Physicist Theologian, I get it: Maybe it is all a virtual world, maybe it is all a holographic projection, maybe it is just a single photon zipping through the interdimensional universe at the speed of time itself.

So what? Within this virtual holographic infinitesimally singular instant, there are people who care about you. It could be a teacher you’re now leaving behind, or the parents who escorted you to commencement, or the sibling who watched you grow into a high school graduate, or the best friend who traveled beside your stumbling adolescence to this precipice of adulthood, or the classmates with whom you shared the. most. formative. moments. of your life.

All of these people were, are, and will be real for however long you hold them in your heart. You’re a reflection of the signatures they’ve left on your identity.

Those autographs in the pages of your yearbook will soon be entombed in a dusty box at the back of a forgotten closet, only to again see the light of day when you’re in need of a nostalgia fix. A lot will happen between now and that someday trip down memory lane; don’t lose sight of the person to whom those heartfelt and playfully teasing comments were once addressed.

Third, I care not a whit about whatever wisdom we’re soon to inherit from our 10th dimensional neighbors. Anything they can offer will still just be coloring in between the lines. Oh, really bro? Yeah?  We’re all just the unified extension of a singular innate consciousness? Word. That garbage doesn’t pay the mortgage.

Meanwhile, of all you learned in school, “remember this the best: Don’t hurt each other and clean up your mess; take a nap every day; wash before you eat; hold hands, stick together, look before you cross the street.”

See? You already know the essentials. Trust me: No one’s more irritated than I am to discover that all those platitudinous clichés lurking smugly in the movies, Bible, television, summer reading list, and zeitgeisty music titles contained the only knowledge worth discovering.

“May the force be with you.”

“Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” 

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

“You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.”

Ugh. If, like me, you round the bases at age 40 and feel stupendously cheated, well, join the club.  “I’ve had the answers all along?!” you’ll shriek as yet another strand of reality is shredded by some new experiment at CERN. “You’re telling me that this whole time, the only things that mattered were the people I loved, the friendships I prioritized, and the memories I made?!”

Yeah, player — looks like it. Pretty anticlimactic, I know. Even when the robots come and the aliens emerge, the ancient insight that’s bound humanity together for thousands of years will remain as true as it always has, to wit, that what’s most vital are the people you can reach out and touch, the memories you make alongside them, and the bittersweet pangs of sorrow when they’re gone.

Sure, in the future it may take a bit longer for people to go. By the end of the decade, there will be vaccines for cancer and heart disease; graduates of the Class of 2023 are projected to have natural life spans in excess of 140 years. But don’t get it twisted: All the people you love will someday be taken. What matters is the love that remains in their place.

Love will persist throughout your journeys despite the inevitable losses you’ll endure, amidst the trials you’ll undergo, and even in your darkest hours. So share it with everyone you can, and be vocal about it.  Having people to catch you when you fall, to reach out to you when you’re alone, or to hold you when you’re sad makes existence a little less tiresome. Just because we probably live in a simulation doesn’t mean your day job will suck any less.

Find people you can count on and who can count on you in return. Indeed, there are peers with whom you’re graduating who’re worth keeping till the bitter end — and then whatever comes next. Because, yes, I get it, “all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.” Roger.

Can I just say that I’m so angry my physics major college roommate was right about time and space being an illusion? He was insufferably pompous about it. That he’s been mathematically vindicated is just plain unjust.

Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Why not? Doesn’t everything feel a bit better when people are nice? Isn’t there something about believing in Santa Claus that makes us all seem to act a bit more like he’s real?

Take Santa Claus with you; he’s as nondenominational a myth as it gets. And there will be people who need him. You’re soon to encounter those so ground down by life, so wounded by past mistakes and betrayals, so embittered by grudges they’re too afraid to release, that they just want to watch the world — or the simulation thereof, or whatever — burn.

And in this upcoming presidential election cycle, the forces of deception and control will deploy an army of “deep fakes” to screw with your perception of reality and compel you to alter it in turn.

But, when you’re not sure what’s real, hold onto the love. Check in with yourself, identify how you’re feeling, and execute that sole worthwhile mission: to love the ones you’re with.

Aliens are among us, artificial intelligence has arisen, and so, yeah, I guess it’s true that “[w]e belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us, are alone.”

We never really were. Because upon your graduation, there were classmates sitting to your right and to your left whom you’ll be happy to someday run into at the airport or on the street or across the table at the improbable romantic date of which you once dreamed.

While today you may be setting out on your own, you’re not doing so alone. Carry the faces of your youth along with you. In your darkest hour, remember that they will answer if you call. Try it out. I promise you — they’ll pick up.

That’s really all I’ve got. Anything more that I might’ve offered has been said before and more eloquently. The best I can do is adapt some of what you’ve already heard so you can pass it along yourself someday. And with that in mind: Love hard, live long, and prosper.