Kosik closed his speech with this bracing, anti-commencement-speech ending. Throughout his address, he had been self-consciously deconstructing the genre — noting that all commencement speakers give 'rather ordinary banal advice, but dressed up in a beautiful moving manner,' and citing Shakespeare's Polonius as the classic example of a fool making platitudes sound profound. Rather than offering neat conclusions, he told the graduates that his own journey — from English lit major to medical school dropout to Harvard professor to UCSB researcher — followed no predictable path. His advice was essentially that he couldn't give advice. 'Having learned the lesson of literature, I'm reticent to give advice,' he said. 'After all I've watched my kids' eyes glaze over when I give them advice.' The bluntness of 'figure it out' carried more respect than any polished platitude. It acknowledged the graduates as adults capable of navigating complexity, and it was consistent with the speech's central theme: that life is shaped less by following others' wisdom than by engaging authentically with the unlikely events that will inevitably arrive.