David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, called 'This is Water' where he addressed the importance of awareness and perceptiveness of others. He believed that simple awareness and proper education can help people become well-adjusted to the world around them. He adopts a witty, personal, and significant tone in order to accomplish his lofty intent.
He began his speech with a parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
The significance of this parable is that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
Like fish in the sea, we are often unaware of our surroundings. Since our own thoughts and needs impact us more urgently, we are predisposed to becoming self-centered. We start to regard those around us in traffic or at the grocery store as inconveniences and nuisances rather than seeing that they are people whose realities are just as vivid and significant as our own, with successes and tragedies of similar magnitude. This happens as a result of the drudgery and mediocrity of daily life. We all live in this water we do not see or understand; we are unaware of its existence, yet we are absolutely confident that our view of it is the correct one.
The True Value of Education
The point of a college education is to show us that we are wrong: not by cramming our heads with unnecessary facts, but by making us aware of the water around us.
Education isn’t about facts — it’s about humility. Wallace believes that:
The real value of a true education has nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with awareness. Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water.’ ‘This is water.’ It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.
You must be conscious enough to be alive and infuse some meaning in the dull and unfulfilling lives that almost everybody is doomed to lead. It’s these lives that are rarely talked about in ordinary commencement speeches.
You Get to Decide What to Worship
For Wallace, another key to a well-adjusted life is what you “choose to worship” since “everybody worships”:
In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
The insidious thing about worshipping money, power, fame, beauty, etc. is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
Don’t Live Life By Default
Most of us operate at the default setting — i.e., automatically. We live our lives as robots — we feel what we are told we should feel. To use Wallace’s analogy, we are fish unaware of the surrounding water. We believe that we exist in an abundant world full of opportunity, success, and freedom. Most of us don’t even know what we mean when we say that we have “freedom.” While there are many ways to feel “free” (money, power, success, beauty, fame, etc.) Wallace speaks of the most powerful kind.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline and effort, and being able truly to care about other people, and to sacrifice for them over and over, in myriad, petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
An average adult's day isn’t even remotely close to those promised in self-help books and entrepreneur manuals. The daily life of an average adult consists of getting up in the morning, heading to a demanding white-collar job, working hard for eight hours, and being so drained at the end of the day that you go home, eat dinner, watch TV, and go to bed since you have to get up and do it all over again. And because you are stuck at work all day long, you have to sit in rush-hour traffic just to get to the grocery store — or anywhere for that matter, surrounded by people who have experienced the same day as you.
If you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
I consciously choose to see that the person making my coffee or standing in front of me in the self-checkout line all have dreams, fears, and insecurities and that perhaps they are battling depression or an illness that I can’t see. You pretty much have two options: choose to believe that it’s all about you and be angry at the world, or choose to see that you are simply a little drop in the ocean.
Choose wisely.