Last week, I had the honor of returning to University of Lynchburg to deliver the commencement address to the Class of 2026. I graduated from Lynchburg (then Lynchburg College) in 2010, and it’s the place I learned how to be a historian. I spoke to the graduating class about the importance of reading, of boredom, and of rejecting the efforts of technology companies to degrade and monetize their time and attention.
My remarks are below. You can also watch them here.
It is truly a pleasure and an honor to be back here at Lynchburg. This school is an extremely important place for me. As President Allison mentioned, I’m a historian. And it was here at Lynchburg where I really learned to read, to write, and to research; to begin to understand the world; and to develop the habits of mind that went on to become my life’s work. So I will always and forever be grateful to this place.
AND AS A HISTORIAN, I think I’m obligated to begin here with a story from the past. So I want to start by talking about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Please, just bear with me here, I promise this is going somewhere.
In the summer of 1862, Abraham Lincoln had been through a tough few years, among the toughest any President—really, any person—has ever endured. Lincoln had run for president two years earlier, in 1860, as the standard bearer for the new Republican Party. He opposed the institution of slavery and committed to stopping its spread to the American west. He won election that year without carrying a single southern state.
After his election, southern states began leaving the United States one by one to establish a new nation dedicated to the perpetuation of slavery. Before he even took office, Lincoln essentially became the President who lost half the country. After nearly a century of struggle to maintain the fragile ties keeping the nation together, its radical experiment in democracy fell apart. Lincoln had to bear the burden of trying to bring these southern states back into the country without compromising on his opposition to slavery. In the spring of 1861, the nation plunged into civil war.
Many Americans in both the north and south thought the war would be over and done with fairly quickly. Instead, it settled into a long, deadly slog. By 1862, white northerners were urging Lincoln to stop the killing and dying and find some way to end the war—even if it meant compromising his pledge to end slavery. The pressure on Lincoln to solve the biggest crisis the nation had ever seen—and to do it quickly—steadily built.
As if civil war wasn’t enough, Lincoln faced personal tragedy that year as well. In February 1862, as war raged, Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie died of typhoid. Willie was the second of Lincoln’s four children to die, and Willie’s death sent both Lincoln and his wife into a tailspin of grief. Lincoln was often prone to bouts of “melancholy,” what today we’d call depression. Lincoln had to support his wife and manage his own grief during this unthinkable tragedy all while still leading a nation that had been plunged into war, with Americans dying by the thousands each and every month.
To put it simply, it was a lot to deal with.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve buckled under the weight of far, far less. If Lincoln had been overwhelmed by the pressure of these compounding tragedies, I don’t know where we would be today. But I do know that slavery, the most horrific institution in our nation’s history, would not have ended how or when it did.
But Lincoln didn’t crash out. He held firm and between the Summer of 1862 and beginning of 1863, he wrote and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the single most important documents in American history. Amid multiple tragedies, Lincoln found the mental focus and moral clarity to free the people enslaved in the rebelling southern states, a decisive moment in winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery.
For us here today though, it’s the way Lincoln managed these unbelievable demands on his time, intellect, and conscience—how he managed to find a way to block out the chaos and distraction—that holds the most important lesson.
We might expect that Lincoln spent hour after hour, day after day in the White House, rejecting sleep and working endlessly to find a solution. But that’s not the case. Instead, Lincoln spent the summer of 1862 at the “Soldier’s Home,” a country residence that, at the time, was a few miles outside of the noise and grime of Washington, DC. Today, it’s called President Lincoln’s Cottage. At the cottage, Lincoln had the space, time, and solitude he needed to think deeply, to process, and to write. Sometimes at the Soldier’s home he just did nothing! His associates occasionally found him in a room of the cottage, long legs draped over the side of a chair, just thinking and staring into space. Lincoln delivered one of the most transformative moments of American history by finding the time and space to focus.
FEW OF US will ever be challenged like Lincoln was. But his story helps highlight something that has become increasingly clear in recent years: achieving anything, living up to our potential, even just maintaining our humanity demands we pull ourselves away from endless sources of distraction. I shudder to think where we’d be if Abraham Lincoln had owned a smartphone.
Today, when it comes to our ability to think and focus, we find ourselves at a moment of genuine crisis. Day after day, we voluntarily hand over our brains and attention to the world’s largest corporations, steadily diminishing our intellectual capacity while we enrich the world’s wealthiest—and most anti-democratic—men. In the process, we’re destroying some of the very things that make us most human.
The smart phone era of the past two decades has been nothing short of disastrous for our minds. Our intellectual abilities have been steadily getting worse. Researchers have found, for example, that people who consume short form video are simply worse at both thinking and paying attention than those who don’t. Americans’ attention spans today are only one-third of what they were twenty years ago. A third! Meanwhile, the number of Americans who report difficulty concentrating has steadily increased. Just having our phone in the room—even when we’re not looking at it!—has been shown to negatively affect our ability to concentrate.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t fare any better. In fact, as it gets shoehorned into seemingly every aspect of our lives—a solution in search of a problem—it is only making things worse. Research is finding that using AI leads to mental exhaustion and severely diminishes users’ critical thinking skills. When we outsource thinking and writing tasks to AI, we eventually end up losing the ability to do them for ourselves. And in exchange, most workers report that AI tools don’t actually save them any time. What a bargain!
These devices and platforms are intentionally designed to be addictive, to capture as much of your time and attention as possible so corporations can turn around and sell it. I’ve seen in my own life how harmful the effects of the digital attention economy can be. I was a senior here at Lynchburg when I got my first iPhone (yes, for the first three years I was in college I had a flip phone; in my defense, it opened both vertically for calls and horizontally for a full keyboard. It was cool, I swear). I immediately began to drift away from the people closest to me. My roommate and best friend, who I had lived with for four years, complained he saw more of the top of my head—as I looked down at my magical glowing box—than he had seen in the previous three years combined. These devices have made parenting harder, as the constant distraction and stimulation of social media makes me more irritable—and as my kids easily point out the hypocrisy of me limiting their screen time while on a never-ending screen binge of my own. It makes work harder, leading me to wonder how much more I could get done, how much better my work could be, if I was operating at full capacity instead of checking my email every five minutes.
And yet here I am—here we all are—endlessly checking our phones, feeling its phantom buzz in our pockets on the rare occasions when we’re not actively looking at it. To put it simply, not just for the graduating class but for everyone here listening: through our addiction to smartphones and social media, we are voluntarily reducing our cognitive abilities, our attention spans, our critical thinking, and our capacity for human connection. These are the things that make us human, and we’re actively destroying them with little benefit in return.
We cannot go on like this. Silencing notifications and limiting screen time will never be enough. As individuals and as a society, we need to completely transform our approach to technology. We need to get off social media. We need to separate ourselves from our phones. When we use digital tools, we need to make sure they are actually advancing the goals we have for our lives and careers, rather than serving as our constant companion, something that saves us from every moment of boredom or the difficulty of deep concentration. Being bored is good for you—ask my kids how often they’ve heard me say that. So, stare into space while you stand in line. Read a book in the doctor’s office. Go to the bathroom the old-fashioned way: with a magazine. You should allow yourself the privilege of being bored. You should welcome it, even demand it. That’s when your mind can do its best work.
Yet welcoming boredom back into our lives is just the first step in rebuilding our capacity for focus, for depth, and for human connection. More than anything else, reclaiming what we’ve lost in the smartphone era means that we need to read.
On a very practical level, as college graduates, most of you will end up working in some kind of knowledge sector job, where your ability to do good work will be directly tied to your ability to make sense of information. People who read will always be better at that than people who don’t. I know it might feel like, now that college is over, you can finally be done with reading, but nothing could be further from the truth. Reading is the best thing you could possibly do for both your career, and for yourself.
Reading widely will help you make sense of a complex and challenging world. Reading will help you expand your sense of the moral universe and cultivate your ability to imagine different futures. Reading can spark ideas, can take you places, can transport and transform you in ways nothing else can. Through reading, YOU are in control of both the content you encounter and the pace at which you encounter it, not a corporate algorithm. Bit by bit, reading rewires and strengthens our brains, it keeps us mentally fit. This training for our minds is just as important as physical exercise is for our bodily health. We cannot put it off any longer.
As graduates of the class of 2026, you’re embarking on the rest of your life at a very unique moment in the history of our nation. In just a couple months, we will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 250 years since the people of this nation dedicated themselves to the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to the proposition that all of us are created equal.
Yet as we approach the 250th, we’re seeing very clearly that history does not always move in a straight line. Democratic norms are crumbling and hard-won rights are being rolled back, not just here but around the world. We’ve seen very clearly how much money and power is dedicated to subverting the principles of the Declaration—much of it flowing directly out of the technology companies controlling so much of our lives. We are seeing clearly that the arc of the moral universe only bends toward justice if we’re there to pull on it. If we don’t, it can just as easily be bent back.
As we take stock in this moment of where the nation is at its 250th, and where we might like our society to be at our tricentennial—knock on wood—we have to recognize that it will only get there if we actively shape it. Taking stock of our own lives demands the same. What do you want out of life? How are you going to make it happen? You will not find those answers at the end of your social feeds, but you might find them in a book. Let reading be your superpower for creating a better career and a happier life.
As you leave here today, heading to graduate school, to careers, to something that you’re going to figure out very soon if people would just stop asking you about it, I ask you not to cede your attention, your intellect, and your life to the massive corporations devoting countless sums of money to try and take it from you. The world is full of challenges, and more generally, adult life can be really hard. Figuring out who you are and what kind of life you want to have demands that you be an active participant. Reading can help you along, and thinking deeply can help you make sense of it. But only if you allow yourself the time.
I will close with this. In the late 1820s, an enslaved child named Frederick Douglass moved to Baltimore, MD. He was about 12 when, in secret, the wife of his enslaver taught him to read. Douglass describes this moment as earth shattering; he suddenly knew the power words could provide. All at once they liberated his mind, while also making clearer than ever the deep injustice of his enslavement, allowing him to see just how much he was being deprived of. Soon after, when his enslavers forbid him from continuing to learn, Douglass traded with kids in the street and men on the docks to get access to whatever reading material he could. He wanted nothing more than to read.
Reading led Douglass to emancipate himself, escaping from slavery and becoming one of the most powerful voices to ever speak out against injustice that this nation has ever known. Douglass later said that “knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom.” No one in American history understood better the value of words, the sacrifices needed to pursue them, or the way to wield them to advance justice. Reading can be just as valuable to all of us today.
So as you think about your own life and your own voice—and how you’ll use it in the years ahead, wherever they bring you—I’ll give you the advice my dad once gave me, which has proven to be the single most important piece of advice I’ve ever received. And that is this: just read, read, read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Reclaim your time and attention, nurture it, use it, and put it to work in the world. Go forth from here and see where reading can take you and discover all you can achieve with your mind. I promise you’ll never regret it.