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The Gust Story

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Isn’t it nice to be with people who are kind, both towards you and others? What if we could all be kind to each other, wouldn’t it be nice? This is what George Saunders is trying to say with the speech he held at the Syracuse University. Saunders believes that as we get older we also get more kind, because we “come to see how useless it is to be selfish – how illogical, really.” As we get older we discover that after all, we are not the heart of the universe, there are other people on this planet and it would be wrong to just keep thinking about ourselves. We discover that our lives are now dominated by people who need us to be kind, because given that we are not, we probably won’t stay in touch with a lot of people. That would be a shame. So what we need to do is to understand, as soon as possible, that we should “[…] be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.” Saunders is afraid that most of the new generation will spend their whole lives trying to succeed, as he states here; ““succeeding” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, […]”. To achieve success by yourself, you have to be selfish. But according to Saunders our lives are just one long gradual process of becoming kinder, we might as well speed it up. Why would anyone one want to achieve success by himself or herself if they could be able to make more people happy at the same time with less effort? Saunders talks about a luminous part of our selves that extends beyond personality, whatever we do we should “believe it exits, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.”
The speech is very well written and Saunder’s language is very

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