History professor Robert Outland stepped to the podium in Dodson Auditorium to deliver his last lecture to about 40 students Monday night — hypothetically.The Students Activities Board is sponsoring the three-part “Last Lecture” series, asking popular faculty, staff and officials, “If you had one last chance to address a group of LSU students, what would you say?”Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist, gave his last lecture about facing terminal cancer in 2007, quickly gaining international attention, and today, universities across the country sponsor their own “last lecture” series.Outland delivered a motivational, emotional and ordinary lecture intertwined with a discussion of today’s economic problems. He also emphasized some of the lessons to be learned from what happened in the 1920s and ’30s.Outland said he wished he could tell students what to do with their lives to make them happy in his “last lecture.””You can’t buy true happiness,” he said. “You can’t surround yourself with cool stuff and in the end be truly satisfied. Hopefully, we will make it out of this economic disaster relatively easy, but we should not let this lesson escape us.”Outland said Americans are living with the disastrous consequences of unsustainable economic practices and are coming out of a decade when people took their jobs for granted.”We center our lives and education around pursuit of more and more expensive stuff that we absolutely don’t need,” Outland said. “We’ve been trying to buy happiness.”Outland said acceptance is so important for Americans, and buying expensive goods rewards Americans with acceptance.”In a way, people in the ’20s got themselves in the same jam for the same reasons,” he said. “The similarities are frightening and embarrassing.”The American economy was booming in the ’20s, and people were living better than ever, he said. Businesses got bigger, factories produced more and economists promised it would only get better.”People had a very primal fear that they wouldn’t be accepted,” Outland said. “They identified themselves by what they had and what they looked like.”But the stock market crashed in October 1929 — forcing a cultural and consumer change.”If you are your stuff, what exactly are you when you lose everything?” Outland asked.Outland said Americans today are being forced to relearn the lessons of the 1930s and go through a very similar cultural correction.”This is a seismic shift occurring in the culture,” he said. “People are enjoying simple activities that don’t cost a thing.”—-Contact Leslie Presnall at [email protected]