Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

 American Columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Schmich originally wrote the “Wear Sunscreen” hypothetical commencement speech as an essay published in the Chicago Tribune in June 1997. It was initially written as a column titled “Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young,” The essay is often misattributed as a commencement speech given by author Kurt Vonnegut at MIT.

In the essay, Schmich implored anyone over 26 years to write their own “Guide to life for graduates“. The essay was the inspiration for the spoken word song by Australian film director Baz Luhrmann’s –Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen.