Set a budget, don’t center your life around work, and other advice for graduates.
Graduation season can be one of both opportunity and existential dread. You’re about to embark on a new chapter of your life and have seemingly endless possibilities ahead of you, whether you’re graduating from undergrad, are beginning your career straight out of high school, or have taken a non-traditional path. All that promise and potential can be just as liberating as it is terrifying.
Almost everyone has well-wishes for new college graduates, advice ranging from trite (“Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life!”) to the ill-advised (any platitude with the word “hustle” in it; anyone who recommends you sacrifice sleep to be more productive).
However, professors who actually work with students, financial experts, and people who’ve been at the crossroads of life say otherwise. Their advice for new graduates is all about relationships: your relationship with your job, your money, and yourself. If you’re looking for a little bit of guidance post-graduation, try a tip or two.
Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Think about work as something that supports your life, not the other way around
“Rather than think of your job as the central axis around which your post-grad life will orbit, start with your vision of a life well-lived, and then consider how your work can support that vision. There’s no shame in prioritizing your career or life outside of work — you’ll likely have seasons of each — but it’s important to be intentional about your choice. If you consider what you value and what the market values, you’ll avoid the trap that exists by over-indexing on just one.” —Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work
Remember that your job will never love you back
“A company is not your friend! Don’t be fooled at a first job into doing so much work you exhaust yourself or burn out because you’re thinking of your boss or the company as a buddy. Protect yourself and join a union if you can. Make sure you’re getting all you can from the job: 401(k) matching, HR benefits, anything they offer. It’s for you. Do not be afraid to ask and get.” —Gabe Dunn, host of the podcast Bad With Money
Consider how you’ll make a mark on the world
“‘Find your purpose in life’ is a common refrain at graduation ceremonies. If only it were that simple. A purpose in life is cultivated, not found. We cultivate purpose by taking the time to consider what we want out of our lives. What do we hope to accomplish? What matters to us? We cultivate purpose by reflecting on our strengths. What special skills or talents do we possess? What do we enjoy doing? We cultivate purpose by considering how we want to give back. How do we want to contribute? How do we want to leave our mark?
“Reflecting on these questions is a process rather than a one-time event, and it takes time. If we remain attentive, though, we will begin to notice that the answers to these questions draw us in a consistent direction, a direction that allows us to contribute to the world in a personally meaningful way. The world desperately needs the skills we each have to offer.” —Kendall Cotton Bronk, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University
Have constant conversations about money
“Ask for a raise annually. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Talk to your friends about money. We’ve been told for far too long that it is rude, tacky, and taboo to talk about how much we make, how much we spend, and whether or not we invest. But staying silent only benefits corporations — not us. You know your BFF’s deepest, darkest secret, why don’t you know how much they get paid?” —Vivian Tu, former Wall Street trader, personal finance expert, and host of the podcast Networth and Chill
Accept that plans will change
“The advice that I wish I’d taken — and still remind myself of every day, if we’re being honest — is staying open to the idea that your path, your interests, your needs, and your ambitions will change. And that’s a good thing. There can be a lot of pressure to find the ‘right’ path and stick to that plan, so venturing off a so-called track is spun as failure rather than growth or curiosity. Sometimes it’s not giving up, it’s changing direction. It’s not failing at a dream, it’s meeting a new version of yourself and embracing new ones. Letting yourself change ensures your work and ambition grow as you do. And it means that doing what you can, and learning as you go, is enough.” —Rainesford Stauffer, author of All The Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive
Continue your education at the University of You
“When faced with the seemingly endless abyss of your post-grad future, break up that future into smaller ‘semesters’ and decide for yourself what the focus of each semester will be for you. Speaking up more in meetings? Taking a creative writing class? Pivoting your career? Spending time with family and friends? One of the hardest things about life after school is figuring out what you want to be doing with your life, and not just what others — parents, professors, coaches — have mapped out for you.
“The sudden disappearance of the structure of school creates a vacuum. If you don’t designate goals for yourself and your life, you will get sucked into someone else’s goals and end up living someone else’s life. So create your own curriculum at the University of You, and whenever someone makes you feel like you’re doing life wrong, just remember that they’re in another major at another school.” —Cece Xie, privacy and tech lawyer, lecturer at Yale, and author of the forthcoming book Big Bad Law
Don’t compare yourself with others at work
“My first piece of advice has to do with your mindset: Remember that the only competition you have at work is with yourself. My second piece of advice is understanding that comparison is the thief of joy. You and your colleagues might work at the same place, but you have your own goals, dreams, and values. I suggest that you give yourself permission to take the time to assess what your career goals are in this season of your life. Be careful and intentional with the stories you tell yourself, because sometimes we put pressure on ourselves to over-perform.” —Minda Harts, workplace equity consultant and author of The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table
Set a budget immediately
“It might be exciting to enter the corporate world and have a salary, but it’s never too early to learn how your compensation breaks down into net versus gross income. Be sure to implement a budget so you know that you have enough money to cover all your expenses and save some for a rainy day (read: unexpected emergencies and fun adventures). There are plenty of budgeting formats and ideas, so try them out to see what works best for you.” —Alyssa Mairanz, founder of the online platform and e-course Adulting in the Real World
Break larger goals into smaller ones
“As you prepare to graduate, please know that it’s normal to feel overwhelmed by the sudden shift into a career and the pressure to have everything together. The key is to break down the big picture into smaller, more achievable snapshots. As soon as you get out of bed in the morning, ask yourself, ‘What’s one thing I can do today to bring me closer to my goal?’ By committing to one small task at a time, you’ll be building up your mental muscles while you make progress. Over time, you’ll find it easier to make better choices that support your dreams.” —Joanna Grover, co-author of The Choice Point: The Scientifically Proven Method to Push Past Mental Walls and Achieve Your Goals
The unconventional, revolutionary hotness of Elaine.
For one reason (Netflix) or another (Netflix), I found myself re-watching Seinfeld over the last couple of weeks, revisiting a show that I first encountered as a kid. I’m now roughly the age of Seinfeld’s leads, and it’s been a humbling experience to slowly relate to and giggle at the characters that I once dismissed as middle-aged dweebs.
Which is how, in a roundabout way, I’ve found myself thinking about Elaine Benes.
Is Seinfeld’s best character hot? Obviously Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine Benes for nine seasons, is a certifiably gorgeous woman, but that’s not the question. Is Elaine herself canonically hot? If she is, why is she hanging out with these dorks? Is she a hot woman doing dorky things? Or is she a dorky woman who happens to be extremely hot? Are hotness and dorkiness mutually exclusive properties?
After an episode (season seven’s “The Secret Code,” more commonly known as the “Bosco” episode) in which she pursues a man who can’t seem to remember her, I realized that how attractive one finds Elaine is crucial to the text.
If Elaine is an average-looking woman, the kind who shouldn’t make George Costanza (Jason Alexander) pull the remains of his hair out just to be in the same room as her, then her forgettability is one thing. No one likes to be forgotten. But if she is, as she appears to be, stunning, then her pursuit of Fred, an aggressively below-average man, is much funnier. Elaine isn’t a woman clawing her way up to win the affection of a man, she’s a beautiful woman sinking to subterranean depths.
Sitcoms, especially those from the ’80s and ’90s, are a strange animal. There’s a baseline level of attractiveness that people, especially women, need to get on television, and sitcoms usually depict what are supposed to be “regular” people. Also, when I first watched Seinfeld, I was 8, and gay — Elaine’s attractiveness eluded me.
Elaine’s canonical hotness might seem clear to modern, adult eyes, but there are reasons to question it.
The scant evidence that Elaine isn’t hot
Here’s some evidence that Elaine wasn’t created specifically as a capital-B beautiful woman, but an appealing everygal. Before Elaine became Elaine, there was Claire (Lee Garlington), a down-to-earth waitress who filled in as “woman” in the pilot. When the role was reconceived, comedian Rosie O’Donnell was among those considered, and the character is rumored to be based on Seinfeld writer Carol Leifer (who later had her own one-season sitcom, Alright Already). Leifer, O’Donnell, and Garlington are all attractive — they got to be on TV, and those are the rules of TV — but they are not women who were cast as bombshells. It seems that when Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David considered a female character for their foursome, they didn’t want her hotness to be paramount. Perhaps this is why Seinfeld’s men regularly acted like Elaine was, at best, average-looking.
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NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Seinfeld operates on the conceit that this friend group is equally hyper-observant and blazingly neurotic. In each episode, Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), George (Jason Alexander), Kramer (Michael Richards), and Elaine home in on the small things in their lives (marble rye, a bank code), have what is essentially a group gossip session about it, and for Seinfeld’s three men, one of the topics is often beautiful women: Bette Midler’s understudy, the naked woman across the street, Marla the virgin, the nurse giving sponge baths in the same hospital room as George’s mother, the cop who gives Jerry a Melrose Place polygraph test, the woman with the big hands. Yet these men, who are terminally obsessed with both wooing beautiful women and analyzing how they’re perceived by beautiful women, don’t react to Elaine in the same way.
Some of this is explained away by Seinfeld lore. Jerry dated Elaine and both were mature enough to continue a platonic friendship (except for a brief “friends with benefits” dalliance in season two’s “The Deal”). George and Kramer, out of deference for Jerry, would respect that.
In re-watching the show, I understood that it also makes for a tighter story. Once you address the elephant in the room — the pachyderm being Elaine’s beauty — then it changes the dynamic of the friend group and the show. Had it gone in that direction, with Jerry and friends being attracted to Elaine, Seinfeld would be more like Friends or maybe a prototype of The Big Bang Theory. The show’s chemistry would’ve been irreparably altered.
“I can tell you this, which is that I know that the writers made it clear that they were not doing that,” said Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, a Seinfeld expert and author of Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything. The “that” in question would be a “will they or won’t they” type of tension between Jerry, or any of the men, and Elaine. Seinfeld’s writers didn’t want their show to hinge on their leads getting romantically involved.
“The network was always harassing them to recreate a Sam and Diane on Cheers thing with Elaine and Jerry. And then finally just said, ‘No. We’re not doing that, because we’re not a normal sitcom,’” Armstrong added.
So looking directly at Elaine’s hotness would be, for the show, like looking directly at the sun — but there are moments when the men briefly realize that they’re in the presence of greatness.
The overwhelming proof that Elaine is real pretty
There are a number of indicators that Elaine indeed looks like Julia Louis-Dreyfus: All three men snap out of it in “The Tape” (season three, episode eight) when she records a sexy message on Jerry’s tape recorder, and in episodes like “The Shoes” (season four, episode 16) and “The Gum” (season seven, episode 10), other men are so distracted by Elaine’s attractiveness that they forget what they’re supposed to be doing. But perhaps the clearest confirmation that Elaine Benes is canonically beautiful is by the transitive property of the men she dates. A few principles of a working theory:
The Jerry theorem: Jerry only dates beautiful women. Throughout the span of the show, there have been a reported 73 different women that Jerry has dated, and they’ve been played by the likes of objectively beautiful actresses like Lauren Graham, Kristin Davis, Courteney Cox, Marlee Matlin, and Teri Hatcher, among others. Elaine dated Jerry. Ergo, Elaine is beautiful.
The law of Puddy: Elaine’s longest relationship on the show is with on-again, off-again boyfriend David Puddy (Patrick Warburton). Empirically, Puddy and Elaine are not a match. He is all id and she, like her friends, is all ego. But the pertinent thing to remember here is that Puddy, who also presents as a hunk, would never date a woman that wasn’t physically beautiful. Puddy dates Elaine, hence Elaine is beautiful.
The famous man thesis: In Seinfeld’s New York City, men are constantly dating women out of their league. That implication is that the women are often settling and the dating pool in this universe is advantageous toward men. The exceptions to this rule are celebrities like the late JFK Jr. (name-dropped in “The Contest”; season four, episode 11) and New York Mets all-star Keith Hernandez (season three, episode 17) who are implied to be the catch. They are so famous, especially in New York City, that they could date any woman they want. Both of them are interested in Elaine. Elaine is beautiful.
The beard proposition: In “The Beard” (season 16, episode 6) a gay man named Robert strategically enlists Elaine to help him. Robert asks Elaine to go see Swan Lake with him, to give the illusion that he’s straight to his conservative boss. In choosing Elaine, it’s suggested that she, at the least, is impressive to straight people. In the Seinfeld universe, presumably, a gay man would not choose any average-looking woman to impress a straight male boss. Elaine also has a one-night fling with Robert where she thinks she gets him to change “teams” but that’s short-lived. Elaine is beautiful, but not beautiful enough to alter men’s sexuality.
The clunker paradox: There have been times when Elaine has gone out on dates with men who may not be up to her standard, like the aforementioned Fred (“The Secret Code,” season seven, episode seven). She acknowledges it herself in that episode, admitting that she only went out with him because he had trouble remembering her. This isn’t an indication that Elaine is somehow physically unattractive but rather a sly commentary on the dire dating scene for New York City women in the ’90s. Elaine dates clunkers but is still beautiful.
Elaine’s hotness only makes the jokes at her expense funnier
Arguably the best Elaine-centered joke of the entire series is her aesthetically unpleasant dancing which debuts in “The Little Kicks,” the fourth episode of the eighth season. George accompanies Elaine to a company party in which Elaine gives a toast and, moved by the spirit and Earth Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star,” she begins to dance.
Elaine’s dance perturbs her friends. The way she moves haunts them, terrorizes their sense of beauty. It’s like watching an ancient, forbidden horror, and after seeing it, no one’s life is ever the same. “It was like a full body dry heave set to music,” George tells Jerry, who consoles him by saying that he too has witnessed the assassination of rhythm by one Elaine Benes.
“No one knows how to tell her to stop or what to say. Everyone is just like oh no,” Armstrong, the Seinfeld expert, explained to me. The disturbing movements Elaine produces are at odds with how beautiful she is, and that’s the joke. “And it’s totally opposed to how it would play if it was like, ‘Hey that’s just dorky Elaine,’” Armstrong added.
Having Elaine play against type is what Armstrong cherishes about the character, and what makes the show singular. Allowing Elaine to be inelegant, messy, and crass was a radical thing.
“I think that it was just really unusual to see this all together — she was beautiful, and smart and successful, and was allowed to be funny, as funny as the guys,” Armstrong explained. “She was actually allowed to be as everything as the guys, like funny and gross. And, you know, even as awful! I would say they’re four pretty awful people and she was equal in that. And that was a revolutionary thing for us.”
The idea of allowing a beautiful female character to be crass and goofy and semi-rotten and having that be championed as a revolutionary act can seem silly if not bleak — rebellion built on what are essentially crumbs of representation.
As Armstrong pointed out, however, Elaine’s predecessors — like Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary — were rarely allowed to be funny and pretty at the same time. Elaine’s peers were often stuck being wives or love interests (see: Friends), and if they were allowed to be sexy, it often came with an apology — something to be laughed at for being tacky (Fran Fine) or uncouth (Peg Bundy). The sitcom trope where a beautiful woman is married to the most aggressively average of dudes exists for a reason.
“Seinfeld is a show with this beautiful, absolutely huge, unmissable woman who is given complete equality — a woman in the middle of this very like male comedy experiment. I have to give them credit for that,” Armstrong said.
Elaine being unapologetically sexy is crucial to the character’s legacy in mapping out what funny women are allowed to do, how they behave, and the problems they have. She’s crucial to Seinfeld’s enduring brilliance. And like the guys in that one episode, I cannot stop thinking about her.
The former prime minister’s arrest reveals Pakistan at a turning point.
Pakistan is in turmoil after the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan earlier this week, and though he’s since been released, the country’s future remains deeply uncertain.
After Khan was arrested by paramilitary officers on Tuesday on charges of corruption for allegedly receiving a bribe in the form of land, mass protests broke out across the country (sometimes violently). Internet service was reportedly suspended in many regions, and at least 2,800 people were arrested and eight have died.
This political crisis is, in one sense, a year in the making after Khan was forced out of the prime ministership in April 2022. But it’s also a reckoning for the country’s democracy, and an indictment of Pakistan’s military, which has played an outsized role in the country’s politics — when it’s not actively running the government.
Though Khan is out of jail, that doesn’t mean the unrest has died down. The military has been deployed in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as the capital, Islamabad, since Wednesday to try and calm the protests. Interim Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, himself the subject of corruption charges, said Saturday that protesters who engaged in violence would be charged in anti-terrorism courts.
Khan was already a legend in Pakistan before entering politics, but the uproar over his arrest is about much more than his days as his country’s top cricketer. Rather, Khan’s populist rhetoric and open conflict with the military have struck a chord with younger Pakistanis in particular — a constituency he’s long been courting. And with record inflation, ethnic and jihadi violence, and serious class inequality defining life for many Pakistanis, it’s no surprise that Khan’s claims of political purity and his purported willingness to stand up to the military are inspiring unprecedented displays of loyalty.
“Although public consciousness about the military’s political role precedes the rise of Imran Khan, supporters of no Pakistani political party have thronged to military establishments as well as the military’s headquarters to protest the victimization of their leaders,” Muhammad Salman, a faculty member in Habib University’s comparative humanities department in Karachi, told Vox. “This represents a new consciousness in Pakistan regarding the problematic political role of the military as well as a desire that it must end now.”
Pakistan’s democracy has been fragile since its founding in 1947, defined by multiple military coups interspersed with political dynasties widely seen as corrupt. Khan, who came to power in 2018 and was initially closely allied with the military, also positioned himself as an outsider who would root out the corruption of the political class before being ousted. This week’s saga has essentially cemented his political comeback.
The saga has also presented Pakistan with an unimaginably challenging and possibly existential dilemma: stick with the old cycle of military repression and malfeasance by corrupt political families, or side with a populist openly and violently disrupting the status quo, who has himself been accused of corruption and whose anti-establishment posturing may be more about politics than principle?
How did Pakistan get here?
Khan has been involved in politics for decades, founding his own political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), in 1996. He initially stood behind Pakistan’s military, even supporting the coup of General Pervez Musharraf in 1999. He came to power in 2018, and the military returned the favor in the initial years of Khan’s tenure, but the relationship soured when Khan asserted his independence, refusing to promote the military’s preferred leaders.
Allegations that Khan aimed to install an ally as army chief against the wishes of the military establishment were reported in the country’s press last spring, leading to a vote of no confidence. A parliamentary coalition comprising of smaller parties and the parties of the Bhutto and Sharif political dynasties ousted him from the prime ministership.
“The events leading up to Khan’s ouster suggest that the withdrawal of military support had indeed taken place, although the military claimed ‘neutrality,’” Salman said. “However, the events preceding the vote of no confidence strongly suggested that the military had orchestrated Khan’s ouster. For instance, smaller parties susceptible to [the] military’s manipulation, such as MQM, PML-Q, BAP … withdrew their support of Khan’s government.”
Khan at the time blamed his ouster on a conspiracy between the opposition and the United States due to his growing cooperation with the Russian and Chinese governments, a claim US officials denied. He insisted that he would not adhere to the results of the vote and that the whole process was “discredited” and “completely marred.”
Since then, he’s been campaigning for the country to hold early elections and to be allowed to run in them. That has involved increasingly vociferous attacks on the country’s military leaders.
On Tuesday, paramilitary troops entered a courthouse in Islamabad and detained Khan on corruption charges, which he has denied. Pakistani officials have accused him of illegally buying land from a business tycoon while serving as prime minister, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to the country’s treasury. These charges are on top of multiple other preexisting cases against Khan. Arrest warrants are also out for Khan’s wife, Bushra Bibi, according to CNN.
Two days later, the country’s supreme court ruled that his arrest was “invalid and unlawful,” and he was released on bail on Friday. In a virtual speech on Saturday from his hometown of Lahore, Khan asked supporters to continue protesting Sunday, signaling the turmoil is far from settled.
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Photo by ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images
Pakistan faces other significant issues in addition to this crisis.
Khan has repeatedly dodged allegations that he won a rigged election in 2018, and his tenure was far from successful, as Abbas Nasir, a Pakistani journalist, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last year.
According to Nasir, Khan’s term in power “was defined by a disregard for civil liberties and independent press, the hounding of his opponents and ignoring procedures of parliamentary democracy. He failed to improve the economy, inflation rose and the International Monetary Fund halted funding after his government refused to stick to its commitments.” Khan’s move toward China and Russia didn’t help either; not only did he damage Pakistan’s relationship with the US, but it didn’t pay off financially either, as “projects in the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor remained more or less stalled.”
However, the ruling government has performed no better. Inflation is precipitously high, “the worst it’s ever been,” according to Farhan Hanif Siddiqi, an associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, and Khan’s arrest has shown to be a serious political blunder. “Unprecedented inflation, the government not being able to deliver anything, combined with the embarrassment that has come [the government’s] way these last four days, is enforcing Imran Khan as the savior of this country.”
The country’s next general election, whenever it is, will then likely mean deciding between business as usual and “the kind of populist politics that has been popular the world over,” as Siddiqi put it.
Pakistan’s future is deeply uncertain
Regardless of what happens next, Pakistanis’ view of their military has shifted dramatically, and that will likely have an effect on the government, too. “There was a time, for example, if you compare this with the politics that Pakistan faced in the 1990s, there was a moral authority that the military commanded, and the politicians were seen as corrupt and the military would make … indirect interventions in order to tell the people that they are the saviors of the country,” Siddiqi explained.
The military has lost some of that sheen through its own actions. “In Pakistan, the role of the military during civilian governments is twofold: (a) to keep civilians in check, (b) to protect the military’s reserved domains,” Salman said. “The first is done by making and breaking political parties, influencing party-switching during electoral process and parliamentary voting, as well as initiating coercive action against political parties.” The military also owns or operates several businesses in the finance, real estate, agriculture, and fertilizer sectors, which it maneuvers to protect and promote, too.
The Pakistani military also allegedly supports a number of violent actors that disrupt the daily lives of civilians, particularly in Balochistan against ethnic Baloch separatists, according to a report from the International Crisis Group. The Pakistani military has a history of supporting violent groups, including the Afghan Taliban, to further its own interests.
There’s evidence that the military’s power is decreasing and stronger democratic institutions are taking hold, though: After Khan’s 2022 ouster, the military could have taken over the government as it has in the past. But “the space for the military is shrinking,” Salman said, as democratic institutions become more entrenched through a raft of constitutional reforms in 2010 after the fall of Musharraf.
The only way out of Pakistan’s political crisis now is to hold elections and let Pakistan’s people decide what direction they want the country to go in. Despite Khan’s popularity and the renewed energy behind his campaign, he’s more spectacle than substance, Siddiqi said. “There’s no talk about what his political program would be, what his ideological program or what is it that he would bring to the people. It’s just about his persona, his personality.”
That puts Pakistani voters in the undesirable position of choosing between an entrenched and corrupt military-backed system and a civilian populist, as Uzair Younus, director of the Pakistan Initiative at the Atlantic Council outlined in a Twitter thread this week.
Torn between a lot of conflicting views over the last few days.
— Uzair Younus عُزیر یُونس (@UzairYounus) May 12, 2023
On the one hand is a regime that has shown a blatant disregard for the constitution and rule of law in .
On the other is a party and leader who has a track record of the same.
How does one deal with this?