Popova framed her entire speech around a story from a spring bike ride in New York. She was pedaling fast and feeling good when someone started catching up behind her. It felt competitive. When he overtook her, she felt defeated — until she realized he was on an electric bike, a food delivery worker rushing to make his living. In that moment she recognized the trap of comparison: the second she began measuring her pace against his, her life against his, she was ejecting herself from her own experience. She urged the graduates to resist pageviews, likes, retweets, and all the quantification metrics that function like demoralizing electric bikes, making you feel that if only you could pedal faster, you'd be worthier of your own life.