New London — "Fast Food Nation" author Eric Schlosser urged more than 400 Connecticut College graduates Sunday to eschew systems of control and embrace randomness.

"Sometimes the best things in life make no sense," Schlosser said in his address to graduating seniors on Tempel Green during the college's 97th commencement. "It's the systems of control — visible and invisible — that surround us, threaten us (and) diminish us."

Letting go of the need to control everything in life — such as the use of numbers to represent success both in school and out — will be up to the new generation that Conn's 447 graduates represent, he said. It's a generation, Schlosser added during the two-hour ceremony, that's been bombarded by marketing messages like never before.

"You can't escape it," he said. "Everywhere you look someone is trying to sell you something."

Both corporations and mass media are bigger and more centralized than ever, Schlosser said. Yet the media, he said, are also more docile and toothless than ever.

Systems keep popping up that promise to take the worry out of decision making, but every system is fallible, Schlosser suggested, because they are ultimately decided by humans. Take the music algorithms used by such apps as Spotify that help decide which pop songs listeners should hear.

"How else could you explain Justin Bieber," Schlosser joked.

Schlosser has made a journalism career out of closely looking at complex systems, such as fast food, drug control, nuclear armaments and prisons.

"The perfect system of control is an impossibility, thank God," he said. "There's a crack in everything — that's how the light gets in."

Schlosser said he prefers randomness — the same randomness that brought his mother and father together on a blind date at Connecticut College more than six decades ago.

Schlosser explained that a young woman driving with her mother had picked up a handsome stranger hitchhiking on a roadway near New Haven in the late 1940s on the way back from visiting Connecticut College for an interview. It turned out the stranger had just been interviewing at Yale Law School, and the woman and man made a pact: If she got into Conn and he got into Yale they would go on a date.

A few months later, the date was made and Schlosser's mother Judith tagged along. That's when she first met Herbert, her future husband, who was a friend of the Yale student.

"They've been together ever since," he said, acknowledging them in the audience.

Schlosser urged graduates to break free of systems, defy expectations and resist the urge to control other people.

"Every single one of us is here right now for reasons that are random and spontaneous, thoroughly mysterious — and ultimately wonderful," Schlosser said.

l.howard@theday.com

Twitter: @KingstonLeeHow