Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and novelist, delivered a commencement address at Durham Academy that was simultaneously hilarious, erudite, and deeply compassionate. This passage came in the middle of a searing critique of what he called 'perfection diseases' — binge drinking, eating disorders, and college suicides — all of which he traced to the impossible pressure to perform. Marlette argued that this pressure was not natural but manufactured. The college entrance industry profits from anxiety. Drug companies profit from feelings of inadequacy. 'What used to be the human condition is now a symptom for a disorder or a disease for which they have a cure.' In this context, telling graduates to ease up on themselves was a radical act of counter-programming against a culture that monetizes their stress. The phrase 'life is not a race' was deliberately aimed at students from an elite private school where, as Marlette noted with comic precision, 'practically everybody makes straight A's, everybody excels, everybody is sensitive, supportive, diverse and multicultural.' For students trained to optimize everything, permission to be imperfect was the most subversive advice imaginable.