Photo illustration by Judy Blomquist/Harvard Staff

Campus & Community

Hey you, hold onto your humanity. You’ll thank me later.

Alexandra Petri

Harvard Correspondent

May 28, 2025

5 min read

A little advice for the graduates — or, at least, one of them (you know who you are)

Part of the
Commencement 2025
series

A collection of features and profiles covering Harvard University’s 374th Commencement.

Alexandra Petri ’10, formerly a Washington Post columnist, is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. She won the 2025 Thurber Prize for American Humor for her book “Alexandra Petri’s U.S. History: Important American Documents I Made Up.”

OK, Harvard graduates. Listen. Many of you want to be doctors and lawyers and researchers and benefit the world in some large way. I’m not talking to you. But the odds are non-zero that somebody currently graduating will be the one guy who makes a ludicrous, cartoonish amount of money and the world worse (that’s zeugma! I was an English concentrator). This is addressed to him, just on the off chance that he is reading the Harvard Gazette. I want to answer the question I am sure is already plaguing him: After the cataclysmic Event happens that unravels society and sends me scurrying to my luxury bunker, how do I keep my guards loyal?

Great question! Let’s dive in.

Okay, you have your luxury bunker with its hydroponic garden, its decontamination chamber, and its secure boundary patrolled by guards. How, once money ceases to be a concept with any relevance to human interactions, do you keep those guards in their place? Remember, before, they were your employees. But now you are alone in your bunker, after the Event! Money no longer matters to them, and they are much stronger than you! Much stronger than anyone! That is why you hired them as guards.

What is it that people do for other people? Make them laugh? Bake them pies? Remember what interests them and ask them about it? Tell stories? Give good foot rubs? Yes! Better!

Oh, you weren’t thinking about that, were you? The special technology you invented to give billionaires a second, bonus set of teeth that descends in front of their original teeth, like a curtain, at the press of a button (I don’t know what billionaires want) may have lined your pockets back in the day, but now you’re alone in that bunker, and you have to justify why you should still be in charge. No algorithms here! No stock exchanges! It’s just you and that strong man you hired, that man whose name is almost certainly Greg (but what if you’re wrong? Can you afford to be wrong? Remember, your money is no good any longer!).

Now it is just you and Greg. You and Greg, and, I hope, his family. You did remember to pick up his family, didn’t you? When you all piled into the helicopter and came rushing here? That’s the first thing I would have recommended.

Society is over. Bang! You created a lot of value for your shareholders, enough value that you were able to commission a yacht too big for even God to lift, have yourself surgically enhanced to look more like the vampire Lestat, and purchase this glorious bunker on a small island. Now large swaths of the planet aren’t livable, for reasons that people would probably say are your fault, if they had survived the Event. You are going to be stuck in this bunker for a while. And unfortunately, your money is no good any longer. Which is a shame because you had such a lot of it! Some of it was even bitcoin. Not that that matters. You can try telling Greg (Is it Greg? Maybe it’s Jeff!) that you have some bitcoin for him and see what he does. Maybe it will make him laugh. Maybe that can be the start of something.

Think hard about your guards! What do they love more than anything in the world? Maybe you can stash some of it in the bunker! But what if it runs out? There’s no way to get more, because society (as previously stated) is over. After you have disposed of the last box of Jeff (Greg?)’s favorite cereal, what will you do? The factory where it used to be made is under the ocean, or possibly being overrun by some sort of Mad Max situation. What it is not doing is making cereal.

Think! Think! What do people love? The warmth of sunshine on their skin? Fresh fruit? The smell of the top of a baby’s head? Doritos? Laughter? Joy? The feeling of being seen? No, no! These answers are all wrong. It needs to be something that you can access after the Event! Something that you can stockpile in advance and store in a vault, to be released at intervals to your guards only if you enter a code that indicates you are still unharmed.

Or, wait. What is it that people do for other people? Make them laugh? Bake them pies? Remember what interests them and ask them about it? Tell stories? Give good foot rubs? Yes! Better! Maybe you can invent a machine that does that and sell access to it in the bunker, using a special coin of your own devising?

No, never mind, we are back to money again. Remember, money doesn’t exist anymore!

What is the thing that you have to offer others? What about you is worth preserving? Don’t tell me it’s absurd that you should have to justify your worth in this transactional way. Don’t tell me you are valuable simply because you are a human being who exists. I know that. But does Greg (Jeff?)?

Maybe you should have thought about that before you made all that value for shareholders and triggered the Event. You should have thought about that before you let the cereal factory sink under the sea. I am begging you to think about it.

Failing that, try getting really, really buff.