So it's time to figure your life out. You've graduated, and it's time to go live life, whatever that means. People are going to have a lot of ideas for you. Some of them might recommend you check out a book, or a movie.

Trouble is, most people are pretty trash at recommending stuff to graduates. If you're lucky, they'll tell you about a heartfelt favorite thing of theirs. These are the good recommendations, the ones that will widen your world and deepen a relationship. Most, however, are the Oh, the Places You'll Go sort, the aspirational stuff that's about things people figure you should be thinking about at this time in your life.

How to Quit Watching TV You Hate You can do it. Promise.

These recommendations are well and good—pop culture can do a lot to help you sort things out, but only if you know what you want to sort out. Hence, this list. It is by no means absolute, or guaranteed to get you on track. No one can really do that but you! But there are things that are worth thinking about outside of what you're going to do with yourself after graduating, and good pop culture gets you thinking about them—and can, possibly give you a little bit of direction.

Congratulations, you made it. Now for the hard part. Here's some help.

Music for Airports by Brian Eno

Maybe you learned this in school, but music is a life-saver when it comes to getting work done. That doesn't change post-graduation, and maintaining the study-flow playlist that got you through exams will do a lot to get you through work no matter if it's engaging or tedious, enriching or soul-crushing. It helps then, to have music that's not just going to help you focus, but also helps maintain serenity and/or sanity. For that, turn to the master. Brian Eno is the grandaddy of ambient music, and and Ambient 1/Music for Airports is a dose of serene bliss to wrap your brain in. Life never stops being chaotic—you just sort of trade one sort of chaos for another as you get older—but put this album on (or something like it) and it'll help you remember that you can absolutely navigate it all.

The Before Trilogy

You have had, and will have, a lot of ideas about love. You might believe them completely and with conviction, or regard them with indifference or despondence. Most likely, you'll change your mind a lot, and contradict yourself regularly. Richard Linklater's Before trilogy of films—Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight—might not address every idea you will have about love at every point of your life, but it'll cover a lot of them. The films—each released and set nine years after the last—drop viewers into a candid hour and a half in the romantic lives of Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy). The two talk about everything, wrestling with ideals and pragmatism when they meet in their 20s, taking on a more jaded but still warm tenor when they meet again in their 30s, before finally wrestling with the sometimes-suffocating difficulty of love that's matured and settled into in their 40s. The films don't posit any real answers to their myriad questions, but that's the point: Love is as vast and complex and hard as everyone says, but it's also as simple as finding who will sort it all out with you.

Daytripper by Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon

Commencement ceremonies are celebrations of potential. They're all about the things you'll go on to do—and once the caps have been tossed and the parties are over and you've moved to wherever you're going to get started, all that talk of promise can stop being encouraging and start feeling more, well, haunting. You or your friends will settle for jobs that seem distant from where you want to work, live in places far from where you want to be, and just generally be frustrated by how hard it is to get started. Daytripper is a graphic novel about getting started. When does it happen? When do you fall in love? Land your dream job? Have a child? A moving work of watercolor and poetry, Daytripper's chapters are a series of snapshots in the life of Brás de Oliva Domingos, a writer of obituaries that wants to write his own novel one day. Through Domingos' life, Bá and Moon explore deliver a beautiful reminder that in life, it all matters, especially the parts that you think don't.

Dear White People

Graduating in 2017 means, one way or another, you're going to have to confront the realities of how politics and identity collide with culture, and the difficulties you—or those around you—can have asserting themselves in a world that does not wish to accommodate them. For this, the new Netflix series based on the 2014 film of the same name, is essential viewing. Creator Justin Simien's show is a very funny, very sharp examination of identity politics and our inability to talk about them. It's also damn good television. Maybe this doesn't seem relevant to you, but it is almost certainly relevant to people around you, and not enough is said about how important it is to engage with the concerns of people unlike yourself.

Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods is a video game that came out this year. You play as an anthropomorphic cat who comes home after dropping out of college and sort of dicks around for a bit. It's a little weird at first. But then it starts getting uncomfortably real, depicting the decline of small-town America and the depression and ennui it breeds, a game about dealing with mental illness and the general listlessness that can come from being a young person navigating a society that doesn't really know what to do with young people. It's simple and thoughtful, cathartic, and humane. Download it on your laptop or Playstation. Let a video game surprise you, and maybe even hit you where you live.

Do the Right Thing

Because this movie was and is and will always be essential viewing.

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel is back on the bestseller list for a reason: It is, unfortunately, the essential text on our current political moment. The fears it vocalized are still incredibly present, the warnings it admonished are still being unheeded. It's also a tremendously good novel, worth reading not just for its thematic relevance, but because its among one of the best dystopian thrillers ever written. Don't sleep on the show, either.

5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird

No one's above some smart, well-done self-help. Learn to recognize it when you see it, and give it a shot.

White Lighter by Typhoon

A gorgeous, triumphant album about how beautiful even a seemingly boring life can be. Small sorrows, moments of self-loathing, quiet questions asked in the night, mortality, love and friendship, all of a very plain sort, are lovingly celebrated in the grand, sweeping sounds of the dozen-plus members of Typhoon. A wonderfully humane album about how there is grace in your life, even if it seems unremarkable.

Hyperbole and a Half is a very funny reminder that it's normal to not have your shit together, and to know that it's okay to ask for help.

The Social Network

David Fincher's 2010 film arrived almost too soon to be taken seriously, but has since proven prescient. Tech is everywhere, but responsibility is not. The wave of Silicon Valley startups that have taken over every aspect of our daily lives deserve a level of skepticism that they often do not receive, all for the very same reasons argued in The Social Network—that technology is political, and the measure of its worth shouldn't be in who it helps, but who it screws over.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

No one knows where Allie Brosh is these days. But from 2009 to 2012, you could have found her on her blog Hyperbole and a Half, spinning crudely illustrated, unbelievably funny yarns about life, dogs, and living with depression. In 2014, Brosh turned her (still online) blog into a book, full of previously unpublished material. Both singular and familiar—the popularity of Brosh's blog and her absurd, exuberant voice meant that she started a lot of memes you might have come across—Hyperbole and a Half is a very funny reminder that it's normal to not have your shit together, and to know that it's okay to ask for help.

Atlanta

The brainchild of polymath/future Lando Calrissian Donald Glover, Atlanta is one of the best debut shows in recent memory, and probably the most thoughtful meditation on navigating modern culture. From Justin Bieber to what it's like to be broke, every episode of Atlanta feels like a gasp of fresh air, a half-hour dedicated to shit everyone deals with but no one on TV talks about. Funny as hell and unafraid of being just as weird, you won't see anything like Atlanta. Make some time for it.

Watch now:

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