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This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)

David Foster Wallace ‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College is a timeless trove of wisdom — right up there with Hunter Thompson on finding your purpose . The speech was made into a thin book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life .

Wallace hits on our need to manage rather than remove our core hard-wired human instincts.

Here are the links to the original audio, followed by a transcript of the entire speech.

This is Water

Transcript:

Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. 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?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.” If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But 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.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. 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.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: 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. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re 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.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, 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.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple 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.”

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. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

This is Water makes a great gift .

Still Curious? David Foster Wallace is the author of Infinite Jest , A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again , Consider the Lobster (a phenomenal book of essays), and the unfinished book he was writing when he committed suicide: The Pale King .

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This Is Water

In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a speech that is now one of his most read pieces. In it, he argues, gorgeously, against “unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” He begins 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?”

When Wallace died, on September 12th, the water churned. Fittingly for a writer whose work encircled itself with annotations, he will leave a legacy composed not only of his novels and essays, and of pieces written about him—official obituaries, elegies, and scholarly papers—but also of a vast and growing system of Web sites, e-mails, message boards, and blogs—and comments on those blogs, and comments on those comments, ad infinitum. His life has a lot of footnotes:

A professor at Amherst remembers Wallace, who babysat his kids, and the writer’s virtuosic senior year at the college.
John Seery, Wallace’s colleague and workout buddy, reveals that Wallace once thanked him for accompanying him to a party otherwise full of gym rats, whom he was afraid might force him to do their algebra homework.
Wallace, from a 1999 interview with Amherst magazine: “I fluctuate between periods of terrible sloth and paralysis and periods of high energy and production, but from what I know about other writers this isn’t unusual.”
An ever-growing accumulation of first-person homages on McSweeney’s , including the simple statement “He helped me to stop wrecking my life, showed me how to help other people and why I should bother."
Pomona students recall their professor, both in the classroom and on the tennis court: “He had a complete game, the kind that comes from years of obsessing over stroke technique and ball location. If there was one sign that he was more than an above-par recreational player, it was the fact that he would employ a relatively advanced tactic, what tennis geeks call ‘taking the ball off the rise.’ It requires sharp reflexes and timing. He did it repeatedly that summer afternoon in 2005."
A series of responses on Metafilter that accumulate like a snowball rolling down a hill. One of the more recent: “I have felt really alive lately, really engaged in my life to a degree that I hadn’t been for a few years, but this was like a punch in the gut. And the head. And the heart.” The post comes with footnotes.
Among the best of Wallace’s fellow-writers’ recollections is Ben Kunkel’s, in n+1 : “The real grief is in the death of a great artist and a kind man.”
A skeleton key .
“The Howling Fantods,” a fan site, memorializes, compiles, and understates : “To say that David Foster Wallace has had a profound influence on my life, the way I think, and the way in which I perceive the world, is an understatement.” (Elsewhere on the site, among numerous links, are Wallace’s uncollected writings.)
All Wallace listserv e-mails from September.
A syllabus from Wallace’s Literary Interpretation class, from 2005.
Wallace speaks .

All of this is, no doubt, just the tip of the iceberg, peeking out of the sea. At Kenyon, Wallace elaborated on his water parable:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about....The fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.

And, nearing the end of his speech:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple 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.

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This is Water

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Analysis: “This Is Water”

A hyper self-conscious attitude pervades “This Is Water,” which is an apotheosis of Wallace’s surgical philosophical thinking and critical gaze. He communicates many schools of thought at once, using humorous parables like the old fish and the atheist versus the religious man. Wallace also taps into philosophical history, particularly the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a significant 20th-century philosopher whose studies were concerned with language, particularly how things are communicated and how misunderstandings arise (Ryerson, James. “ Philosophical Sweep .” Slate , 21 Dec. 2010). These ideas can be seen in the speech’s numerous angles of attack at the same problem: how people think.

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“This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace Essay

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Introduction

Freedom in decision making, meaning and importance of education, the lesson on default setting, works cited.

David Wallace was one of the most important postmodern authors in America. He had already gained attention with his first book, “The Broom of the System.” Still, his second novel, “Infinite Jest,” catapulted him to national prominence and made him one of the most respected authors of the modern American era. ‘This is water,’ his book, was essentially an expanded version of Wallace’s commencement speech to a group of graduating students. Unlike other books, which were panned for being overly long for their own sake, this commencement speech was generally praised, and even named one of the top 10 best commencement speeches in history by ‘Time’ magazine.

In his speech ‘This is water,’ Wallace’s goal was to stress the importance of perceptiveness, and awareness of others. He felt that through combining awareness, and education, people would become well-adjusted to their surroundings. To achieve his argumentative goal for his audience, he used a personal, and comic tone. This essay will focus on giving a summary of David Wallace’s ‘The Water’.

After greeting and praising the students for their hard work, Wallace opened his address with a remarkable parable based on a fish story. The significance of the fish story, he continued, was simply that the most significant realities were frequently the most difficult to see, and discuss. In other words, people were living in water but could not see, and were completely oblivious of its presence. On the other hand, Wallace felt that most people were mistaken and that it was the mission of liberal arts education to tell them they were wrong

Liberal arts education was designed to make people aware of the water in their surroundings rather than filling their heads with unimportant information. Wallace’s main point in his speech was that often the most obvious things were the most difficult to comprehend. He stated, in particular, that negative thinking was not a choice but a natural setting, and that individuals needed to start thinking cognitively, and beyond the box.

Wallace delivered his commencement address to Kenyon College’s 2005 graduating class intending to prepare the students for the future life they were about to embark on after college. He used a grocery store example in his speech so that the students could relate since they had been in the situation. Wallace was also able to connect with his audience by using this grocery example. He further highlighted that, while individuals believed they were trapped in a ‘rat race, they had the option of choosing between two options: looking at the situation negatively and getting a bad result, or looking at it positively and feeling better about the situation.

Wallace exemplified this point by stating that the inability to make a conscious decision about what to pay attention to would irritate them every time they went shopping. He also noted that many people were narrow-minded, and loved evaluating others. However, each possessed the capacity to change a situation by making it cheerful and hopeful.

In his address ‘This is Water,’ David Foster Wallace reminded Kenyon students that education was more than a piece of paper, and did not merely comprise learning. Wallace defined education as being conscious and aware enough to generate meaning from experience. Proper education also taught people to be less arrogant and to have even a little bit of uncertainty about themselves and their convictions. Because a large percentage of people’s actions turned out to be incorrect, education was meant to put this error into words that would be alive, and conscious giving meaning to the ultimately unfulfilling, and dull lives that practically everyone was bound to mention. He also observed that speakers rarely talked about these lives in commencement speeches.

Wallace explained the entailment of a typical adult’s day, emphasizing that an average adult’s day was in no way comparable to the ones promised in entrepreneur manuals and self-help books. On the other hand, an ordinary adult day consisted of people getting up in the morning, going to their college-graduate white-collar jobs, resting afterward, and waiting for the next day (Neveu, 161). Due to their hectic schedules, they would even lack time to make themselves lunch.

However, despite the after-work fatigue, and lack of time, they always had a choice: they could either believe it was all about them and thus blame everyone. On the other hand, they could recognize that they were just a drop of water in the ocean and that everyone was dealing with a similar or the same issue.

Wallace claimed in his speech that people’s character was defined by the modest decisions they made every day in their everyday struggles. It was clear from his knowledgeable words that he explained everything from a distinct and, interesting perspective. David Foster Wallace also proposed a hypothesis in which all humans behaved on the simple premise that they were the center of the universe and that every decision they made was motivated by their desires. He claimed that people’s “default setting” was responsible for robbing them of their ability to see situations as they were (Severs, 303). In addition, he emphasized the importance of the audience combating their natural selfishness, and the constant belief that their own identity, triumphs, and failures were the most important things to them.

Wallace observed that the majority of people operated on the automatic setting. As a result, many individuals lived like robots programmed to feel through instruction and not willing, or like fish unconscious of the surrounding seas using Wallace’s metaphor. In his speech, he argued that the most crucial type of freedom entailed knowledge, discipline, concentration, and the ability to care about other people and sacrifice for them sincerely. He saw these constituents of freedom as true liberties that required education and knowledge from other points of view. However, the persistent gnawing sense of having had and lost some endless thing was the alternative to this type of freedom.

In conclusion, ‘This is Water’ emphasized the importance of exhibiting compassion and empathy for others. Wallace stated that it was essential for people to see life, and everything around them from many perspectives, irrespective of the scenario. He insisted that the audience make their lives more meaningful, beneficial, and experienced by demonstrating compassion and being mindful of others. Waiting in a severe traffic jam after a long day at work would be aggravating for most people. However, Wallace believed it was vital for such situations in life so that people could understand that life did not always revolve around them.

Also, there were significant, and more considerable reasons for the occurrence of these events. As a result, it was critical for the audience to maintain the perspective that others could be in worse conditions than themselves, and that they were not always superior to others.

Neveu, Marc J. “How’s the Water?” Journal of Architectural Education , vol. 74, no. 2, 2020, pp. 161-161.

Severs, J. “Cutting consciousness down to size: David Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the scale of encyclopedic fiction.” Scale in Literature and Culture , 2017, pp. 281-303. Web.

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Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, November 25). “This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace. https://ivypanda.com/essays/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace/

"“This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace." IvyPanda , 25 Nov. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '“This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace'. 25 November.

IvyPanda . 2022. "“This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace." November 25, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace/.

1. IvyPanda . "“This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace." November 25, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "“This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace." November 25, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace/.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

The book in three sentences.

Learning “how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It can be easy to spend our entire lives accepting our natural default ways of thinking rather than choosing to look differently at life. The only thing that is capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see life and how you construct meaning from experience.

This is Water summary

This is my book summary of This is Water by David Foster Wallace. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

The meaning we construct out of life is a matter of personal, intentional choice. It’s a conscious decision.
So often, we hold beliefs so tightly we don’t even realize they can be questioned—arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that’s like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
Our natural setting is to be deeply and literally self-centered. There’s no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. We see the whole world through this lens.
People who can adjust away from this natural, self-centered setting are often described as “well-adjusted.”
It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head.
Learning “how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
You have to choose what you pay attention to and choose how you construct meaning from experience.
It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in the head.
The natural default setting is to think I am at the center of the world and my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at life. If you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.
The only thing that is capital-T True in life is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. This is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.
Everybody worships. We just get to choose what to worship.
The trick is to keep truth up front in daily consciousness.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship (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.
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 taught 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.
The biggest of questions is not about life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.
The real value of education has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness—awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves of it over and over.

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3 Profound Life Lessons from “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace

By Kyle Kowalski · 23 Comments

In 2005, David Foster Wallace delivered the “This is Water” commencement speech at Kenyon College. I’ve studied and written about the most viewed commencement speeches in the past, but this one is special.

In just over 20 minutes, he covers the “unsexy” yet very real realities of day-to-day adult life. The graduating audience appears to laugh at various times in the speech, but I don’t think David Foster Wallace intended for any of it to be humorous. He’s calling out the “default setting” of the unconscious human minds that are all too common in mainstream society. The state of your own mind will determine how you live in the “day in and day out” and “day-to-day trenches of adult existence.”

While he pokes fun at “didactic little parable-ish stories” in commencement speeches, David Foster Wallace delivers one of the best. This post outlines my own personal interpretation of his speech.

If you’re interested, you can listen to the full speech here:

Sloww This Is Water David Foster Wallace

The Purpose of This is Water by David Foster Wallace

The Purpose of the Fish Story:

“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?’ “
“If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.”
“ The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple 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.’ “

3 Profound Life Lessons from This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Sloww This is Water David Foster Wallace Infographic

“And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.”
“If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.”
“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.” (Note: See my own experience with lifestyle inflation .)
“And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.”
“The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.”
“The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.”
“If I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop.”
“Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice , you can choose to look differently.”
“The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.”
“You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.”
“Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
“Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education—least in my own case—is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.”
“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But 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 whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness .”
“It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.”

How are you doing on these three life lessons? Do you acknowledge your default setting? Are you exercising control and choice over your mind? How about paying attention and staying present?

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, 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.”

Sloww This is Water David Foster Wallace Quote

About Kyle Kowalski

👋 Hi, I'm Kyle―the human behind Sloww . I'm an ex-marketing executive turned self-education entrepreneur after an existential crisis in 2015. In one sentence: my purpose is synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development . But, I’m not a professor, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, mystic, or guru. I’m an interconnector across all those humans and many more—an "independent, inquiring, interdisciplinary integrator" (in other words, it's just me over here, asking questions, crossing disciplines, and making connections). To keep it simple, you can just call me a "synthesizer." Sloww shares the art of living with students of life . Read my story.

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Reader Interactions

February 13, 2019 at 10:54 PM

February 14, 2019 at 12:16 AM

You’re welcome, Mark!

July 17, 2019 at 2:41 PM

I know, this is old. I’ve just happened upon this because some one recommend this speech to me. Frankly, I hated it and DFW came across as a psychopath and an unaware narcissist. And I’ve read and reread through the transcript and I can’t see what the big deal is. I don’t know what was suppose to be so deep or moving. I’m assuming I’m wrong or missed something. Anyone care to enlighten me? I know no one will see this but I hit the web in a fit of anger and wound up here.

July 17, 2019 at 3:48 PM

“The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” Just like the fish are in water without realizing it, we are in the default setting of our minds without realizing it. We have a choice of how and what to think. In other words, we can shift from the default setting to conscious awareness.

January 23, 2020 at 8:47 PM

This was a really good, quick summary and analysis of the speech. Thanks for taking the time to do all this!

January 30, 2020 at 11:58 AM

Of course, Trent!

June 16, 2020 at 3:18 AM

Kyle. That really is an excellent summary. This essay and Hunter S Thompson’s letter to a friend are two of my absolute favourites. Keep well and thanks for writing this piece

August 6, 2020 at 12:05 AM

Appreciate it, Chris! I’ll check out the Hunter S. Thompson essay.

September 28, 2019 at 11:19 PM

Be less certain.

October 7, 2019 at 1:13 PM

You got it, Joe!

November 21, 2019 at 5:52 PM

Awesome analysis Kyle.

December 16, 2019 at 11:57 PM

I appreciate it, Jake.

January 6, 2020 at 2:57 PM

Thank you sir

January 14, 2020 at 9:40 AM

Sure thing (love your username, by the way :))

January 27, 2020 at 7:09 PM

I didn’t realise how potent the message was when I was first listened to ‘This is Water’ 6 months ago. It’s saved my life a couple of times over the last few months whilst I’ve been experiencing an existential crisis. Crazy what a shift of consciousness can mean to your understanding of the world, and your part in it. Thank you so much for this and for your blog.

January 30, 2020 at 11:33 AM

Of course, Yvie! I also revisited this speech just the other day. I think it will always be relevant because it’s so applicable to day-to-day reality. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out my own existential crisis story (along with the comments of many others experiencing their own crises today).

June 22, 2020 at 7:17 PM

I was introduced to this speech by my professor at University, and have listened and shared this speech numerous times. This speech promotes the need for empathy in our society.

August 5, 2020 at 12:22 AM

Keep sharing the good word, Jasprit!

June 9, 2023 at 12:57 AM

This is a helpful summary, Kyle! This speech is actually an eye opener and truly inspirational.

November 26, 2020 at 5:17 PM

I’m doing an English assignment on this speech, and this site helped me understand it better

February 6, 2022 at 3:11 PM

What is the English assignment?

March 2, 2022 at 11:01 PM

I am supposed to write an essay of my analysis of this speech. I just cannot figure out a way to explain the repeating phrase at the end “this is water”… It would be great if anyone can help!

July 25, 2022 at 11:05 AM

Hi Julie, I thought I would take a shot at answering your question, not in a definitive way but just in a way that came to me as I went back to the talk and listened to the end again.

What spoke to me was the part just before “this is water” which was “we need to keep reminding ourselves”. It is likely that your need for this essay is long past and you figured out a response for yourself since you wrote that in March, and here it is toward the end of July. But if I might paraphrase the ending it would be, “keep reminding ourselves that this, whatever this is that is happening in front of me and to me, is the only reality I can count on.”

My story, my take away, my lessons learned will all come from this and may or may not be true accurate or helpful, but yes, whatever this is, and in the message he presented it was “water to the fish“ is the same thing as whatever is happening to us as humans. I don’t know if this helps you but it helped me to think through this and I appreciate your question.

🆕 Synthesizer Course

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This is water : some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion about living a compassionate life

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‘This Is Water’: Complete Audio of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Graduation Speech (2005)

in Graduation Speech , Life , Literature | March 6th, 2012 4 Comments

Last month, on the occasion of the author’s 50th birthday, we posted a large collection of free essays and stories by David Foster Wallace . But we missed a rare item: the complete audio recording of the commencement address Wallace gave at Kenyon College, in Ohio, on May 21, 2005–three years before he took his own life. The text of the speech has been published on the Internet and as a book called This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life , but the complete audio version has been hard to find.

In the speech, Wallace talks about the challenge of moving beyond the superficial kind of freedom that can be acquired through power and wealth, toward a truer liberation that arises only when we become more fully conscious of the world outside our “tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” He says:

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. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race”–the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

You can listen to the first half of the speech above. And to delve deeper into Wallace’s worldview, be sure to watch the fascinating 84-minute interview he gave in 2003 to a German television station. H/T Avi Burstein.

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This is Water – David Foster Wallace

Wisdom | 3 comments

Charlie Rose interviewed the late David Foster Wallace, on March 27, 1997

“How’s the water?”

… The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about…

…the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…

… the real value of a real education… has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple 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.”

DFW KenyonAddress 2005 Transcript

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008 Excerpts from the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address . An Appreciation of David Wallace by David Gates: Newsweek Web Exclusive

The New York Times , Sunday Book Review: Great and Terrible Truths :

“Truthful, funny and unflaggingly warm, the address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man. At the edges, though, there was something else – the faint but unmistakable sense that Wallace had passed through considerable darkness, some of which still clung to him… The glory of the work and the tragedy of the life are relations but not friends, informants but not intimates. Exult in one; weep for the other.” by Tom Bissell

Zen Moments is seeking permission from the publishers to republish a longer extract of this speech.

Photo by Fabrizio Comolli with kind permission.

Thank you to John Morgan for suggesting this article.

This Is Water: Some Thoughts…

“It’s a short book, only 134 pages, with one sentence per page which leaves a lot of white space on every page. In other words, the book is for people who think about what they read… It’s the Abraham Lincoln approach; he didn’t have a lot to say at Gettysburg in 1863, and the brevity of his remarks was roundly condemned at the time; but, the content has stood the test of time, just as I suspect this book will stand the test of time.” Amazon customer review

“Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike’s deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.” Amazon Review

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by Time magazine.

Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years”. With his suicide, he left behind an unfinished novel, The Pale King, which was subsequently published in 2011, and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which was not awarded that year. Wikipedia

You might also like:

Brazen Teacher left this comment on our Facebook Page: “In regards to ZM’s “This is Water” post- I haven’t read such a pertinent article for my life and teaching- in quite a long time. I emailed the link to my whole address book. Thank you :-)”

There is so much clear thinking and wisdom here – the part about looking differently at people, reminded me of a link sent to Zen Moments by Louise/tonesofhome:

Give ‘Em A Break: Everyday Love and Assumptions by Carrie & Danielle

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"This Is Water" Speech by David Foster Wallace

This speech was originally delivered by David Foster Wallace as the 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.

Speech Transcript

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

You get the idea.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. 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.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

“This is water.”

I wish you way more than luck.

Browse more of history's greatest speeches →

The speech was originally published on the Kenyon College website .

About the author

‍ Daniel Scrivner is an award-winner designer and angel investor. He's led design work at Apple, Square, and now ClassDojo. He's an early investor in Notion, Public.com, and Anduril. He founded Ligature: The Design VC and Outlier Academy . Daniel has interviewed the world’s leading founders and investors including Scott Belsky, Luke Gromen, Kevin Kelly, Gokul Rajaram, and Brian Scudamore.

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David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech (Full Transcript and Audio)

Anthony V. Lombardo

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On September 12, 2008, David Foster Wallace tragically took his own life.

As a writer, essayist, and professor, Wallace is best known for his complex and thought-provoking works, particularly “Infinite Jest,” a novel that delves deep into themes of addiction and entertainment in a dystopian future. His writing is revered for its intellectual depth and complexity.

However, Wallace’s life was far from a fairy tale. Despite his literary success, Wallace grappled with depression for much of his life, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work that continues to illuminate the minds of those who appreciated his unique perspective

Beyond his literary genius, Wallace is also known for delivering one of the most powerful and timeless addresses ever given.

In 2005, David Foster Wallace delivered a commencement speech, titled “This Is Water,” to the graduating class at Kenyon College. However, Wallace didn’t just deliver a run-of-the-mill graduation talk; he shared a treasure trove of wisdom featuring deep insights about life, consciousness, and our default mode of thinking. After his death, This Is Water became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times , and later turned into a book .

Below is a brief overview of the lessons shared in his address, some key quotes in the speech, links to the original audio followed by the transcript of the entire speech. It truly is a voyage of the mind that promises to leave you enriched and in contemplation.

Overview of David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech: 10 Lessons

In many ways, Wallace’s “This Is Water” address can be seen as a roadmap for living, and a call to question the ordinary. While Wallace shared numerous insights, below are 10 of the most powerful lessons he shared.

1. The Default Setting

Wallace reminds us that our natural inclination is to be self-centered. But here’s the kicker: we have the power to transcend this default setting. It’s the conscious choice to see beyond ourselves, our worries, and our immediate concerns. In doing so, we open the door to empathy and a more profound understanding of the world.

2. Awareness

“Pay attention” is the rallying cry here. Wallace urges us to truly notice the beauty and complexity of everyday life, even in the midst of our busy, often chaotic existence. It’s a reminder to find awe in the mundane and treasure the ordinary moments.

Embracing empathy is a recurring theme throughout the speech—not just a soft skill, but as a way of life. Wallace emphasizes the importance of understanding the struggles and perspectives of others. It’s about stepping into someone else’s shoes and feeling the world through their eyes.

4. Thinking

For Wallace, merely existing isn’t good enough; he encourages us to be active participants in our thoughts. We must learn to choose what we think about and not allow our minds drift passively through life. This deliberate thinking is the key to empowerment.

5. Freedom of Thought

Education is more than textbooks, exams, and degrees on the wall; it’s the path to liberation. Wallace argues that education is about learning how to think and, more importantly, how to choose what we pay attention to. The result? Real freedom.

6. Avoiding Arrogance

Arrogance and judgmental thinking may seem like confident armor, but Wallace asks us to see through this illusion. He warns against being trapped in a closed-minded world. The antidote? Humility, empathy, and the willingness to learn from others.

7. Real Freedom

The realest of freedoms, according to Wallace isn’t about governments or laws; it’s the freedom of self-awareness. It’s the ability to consciously choose your beliefs and attitudes, unhindered by external influences.

8. Value of Routine

While routines may seem mundane and repetitive, Wallace offers a fresh perspective. He sees them as a source of comfort and discipline in our lives, providing a stable backdrop against the chaos of the world.

9. Sacrifice and Unselfishness

True heroism isn’t about grand gestures; for Wallace, it’s in the small, daily acts of unselfishness. These tiny, seemingly insignificant actions can transform your life and the lives of those around you.

10. Conscious Living

The central theme of Wallace’s entire speech is really about elevating your consciousness. He constantly reminds us that the quality of your life is, in large part, determined by what you pay attention to, what you hold as valuable, and what you worship. Wallace’s message is simple: be mindful of your choices, for they shape your world.

5 Quotes From David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech

Let’s dive into the heart of David Foster Wallace’s message by looking at the pictures he painted with his words. Here are five standout quotes from his speech.

1. “This is water. This is water.”

Picture this: you’re in the midst of the mundane, stuck in traffic, or waiting in a long line at the grocery store. Wallace’s mantra, “This is water. This is water,” is a wake-up call. It reminds us that even in the ordinary, there’s depth. It’s like seeing a rainbow in a rain shower – beauty in the everyday.

2. “The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

We’ve all been there, searching for something profound and missing what is staring us smack in the face. Wallace nudges us to pay attention to what’s right in front of our noses. The world isn’t just the surface; it’s layers upon layers, waiting for us to peel back the curtain.

3. “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 lit the stars.”

Wallace suggests a perspective shift when it comes to the things in life that frustrate us, our personal challenges, and even our pain and suffering. He encourages us to see the sacred and beauty even in the chaotic. That same jam-packed subway ride you take every morning to a job you hate can be transformed into a moment of profound connection with your humanity.

4. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

True freedom isn’t just about breaking physical chains like quitting your nine-to-five to become a digital nomad. It’s the power to be fully present, to care for others, and to make small sacrifices. It’s the liberty to be at your best, most compassionate self, day in and day out.

5. “The world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.”

Wallace spotlights the gravitational pull of conformity and the status quo settings that society often hypnotizes us to follow. It is up to us to muster the courage and discipline to resist the urge to follow the crowd, to break away from the conventional, and to forge our own paths with intention.

This Is Water: The Full Transcript of David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech

Here is the full transcript of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech along with links to the audio. It’s a remarkable read, and I encourage you to take the time to absorb its wisdom and insight.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

You get the idea.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. 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.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

“This is water.”

I wish you way more than luck.

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This is Water David Foster Wallace Summary

Summary & analysis of this is water by david foster wallace, this is water | summary.

Beginning his speech with a clichéd parable from Infinite Jest that serves as a metaphor for the invisible forces that shape our lives and how we often fail to recognize them, David Foster Wallace challenges the conventional expectations placed on commencement speakers and explores the idea that certain clichés and overused stories can still convey profound truths . Unlike the wise old fish in his analogy, Wallace does not claim to possess a profound philosophical understanding of the “water” of life. Instead, he focuses on the lessons embedded within these well-worn narratives. He asserts that the most significant and fundamental realities are often the most difficult to articulate.

Wallace deconstructs common speech topics, such as the value of a liberal arts education in terms of its “human value” and the development of critical thinking skills rather than the accumulation of knowledge. While he found these ideas tiresome as a student, he acknowledges that there is wisdom to be found within clichés. He emphasizes that what truly matters is not how students think, but rather what they choose to direct their thoughts towards. Despite the seemingly obvious freedom to think about anything, Wallace encourages his audience to pay attention to the seemingly mundane and commonplace aspects of life.

This is Water | Analysis

“The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people” .

This is Water | Rhetorical Analysis

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Ben Matthews

David Foster Wallace: This Is Water (Video and Transcript)

David Foster Wallace is one of my all time favourite authors. From the hilarious and varied essays of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again to the incredible genius of Infinite Jest , he is likely to go down as one of the world’s greatest authors. Indeed, Infinite Jest was cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by Time magazine.

Tragically, he committed suicide in September 2008. In an interview with The New York Times , Wallace’s father reported that Wallace had suffered from depression for more than 20 years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive. Unfortunately, in the time leading up to his death, his depression became more and more severe.

One of the most accessible and enjoyable pieces of Wallace’s work is his Commencement Address at Kenyon College given in 2005. It’s a short read, which shouldn’t take longer than 20 minutes to get through, but gives you a valuable insight into his style, humour and brilliance. And it’s damn good advice for life.

So I was delighted to see that The Glossary have put a video to Wallace’s words, to fantastic effect. Here’s the description from the video:

“In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education. We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested.”

Here’s the video itself (watch the video in full screen and put your headphones on for a fully immersive experience):

Beautiful, no?

The full This Is Water transcript is below, in case you’re interested and want to re-read at a later date.

I highly recommend you read up on Wallace, dive into his books, and experience more of his genius for yourself.

Now, back to tackling Infinite Jest…

Transcription of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005 (via Marginalia)

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings [“parents”?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. 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?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story [“thing”] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But 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.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. 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.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: 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, bet 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. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible — sounds like “displayal”]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

“This is water.”

I wish you way more than luck.

This is Water

Talks largely about the ethics of how we decide to think and what must mean for us as we go through our lives. Originally written as a commencement address at Kenyon College.

How we construct meaning, and what we choose to do with that, is a matter of our own personal choice.
Sometimes the most obvious and widespread realities of life are difficult for us to see - the wood for the trees, as it were.
'The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.'
There is no experience that we have in life where we, as an individual, are not the centre of the experience. How we choose to think about each experience we have is crucial to how we move through life.
We must exercise our abilities of learning how to think. That is, we must be conscious and aware, first of all, of what we decide to pay attention to then, second, decide how we are to construct meaning from what we have paid attention to.
'If you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.'
'...an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.'
Whatever it is you choose to worship - and we all worship something, whether we choose to or not - and it will bear ill fruit. Money? You won't have enough of it. Your own body? You will feel ugly. Power? You will feel weak and afraid. Your own intellect? You will feel stupid and fraudulent.
'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.'
'The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” — the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.'

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November 30, 2022, mindset & life lessons, today at a glance.

On May 21, 2005, David Foster Wallace stepped up to the podium at Kenyon College to deliver the annual commencement address. If there is one piece of writing that has had the greatest impact on how I think about the world and my experience in it, it is this speech.
When we allow our arrogance to win, we are the prisoner completely unaware of our state of imprisonment. When we fight the arrogance, we experience a richer, more complex, and more dynamic existence.
We all come with a default setting that places ourselves at the center of the universe and disallows any level of compassion or empathy. Rejecting the default setting breathes new life into our days.
Do not allow yourself to be enslaved by the mimetic worships of your default settings. True freedom is found in choosing how to think and what to think about.

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On May 21, 2005, David Foster Wallace stepped up to the podium at Kenyon College to deliver the annual commencement address.

The author was most well known for his novels, which had received much critical acclaim and had earned him the praise of being called, "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."

If he were alive today, I can only assume that it would shock him to learn that the speech he delivered in 2005 would be perhaps his most durable and impactful contribution to the world.

To put it simply, if there is one piece of writing that has had the greatest impact on how I think about the world and my experience in it, it is this speech.

The speech—which would later become known as "This Is Water"—begins with a simple parable of the young fish and the old fish.

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?”

With this clever opener, David Foster Wallace makes a central point that runs through the speech: the most important realities are often completely invisible to us (and will remain that way if we let them).

In today's piece, I'd like to take you on a short journey through his words, cover the three critical lessons that have had a lasting impact on my life, and leave you with one action item.

(Note: Italics represent quotes from the speech, with bolded portions added for emphasis)

Lesson: Fight the Arrogance

Early in the speech, Foster Wallace shares a simple story of a religious man and an atheist discussing the atheist's near-death experience at a bar.

The atheist was on the verge of death in a snowstorm, so tried praying, and was promptly saved by two eskimos who came walking past him.

The religious man hears the story as conclusive proof of the existence of a God—the prayers were answered. The atheist tells the story as conclusive proof of the lack of existence of a God—two eskimos saved him, not his prayers.

Here, Foster Wallace makes his point:

But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up ...The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

There's a quote attributed to Mark Twain that I absolutely love: "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."

We all walk through the world in a natural state of hard-wired arrogance. It basically tells us that we are great and correct and everyone else is not-so-great and wrong.

It's easier for us to have a 100% certain view of the world—to allow every new fact to either:

Confirm our view of reality and be absorbed, OR
Refute our view of reality and be bounced off into oblivion.

But easy ≠ correct.

When we allow our arrogance to win, we are the prisoner completely unaware of our state of imprisonment.

When we fight the arrogance—when we learn to question some of our baseline certainties—we experience a richer, more complex, and more dynamic existence.

Lesson: Reject Your Default Setting

Building on this, Foster Wallace addresses the human propensity for allowing misery to govern the banalities of day-to-day life:

The "default setting" is a critical concept to internalize.

We all come with a factory setting, replete with arrogance, that places each of us at the center of our own universe and disallows the compassion or empathy that breathes new life into our days.

Foster Wallace expands on the idea with a deeper dive into the practical meaning of "day-in-day-out" in an average life. He weaves an illustration of a long day at work followed by traffic jams and a crowded supermarket—an easy-to-imagine tale of annoyance and misery.

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But 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.

When we reject our default setting, we are letting compassion and empathy expand our worldview beyond ourselves. Not only does this enable us to view the world in a more intellectually honest manner, it also allows a fire to bring new energy to the banalities we so often dread.

Lesson: Find True Freedom

The closing section of the speech begins with a passage on the dangers of blind, unconscious worship:

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship...There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship... 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... Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid , and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud , always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

This all reminds me of the Ancient Greek story of Narcissus, who is so obsessed with his beauty that he sees his own reflection in a pool of water, becomes entranced, and falls into the water and drowns.

That which we worship becomes that which enslaves us. When we allow mimetic desire and default settings to control our worship, we are on a collision course with misery.

But when we reject our default settings, we can embrace our ability to choose how we direct our attention and awareness:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, 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… It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple 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.”

True freedom is found in choosing how to think and what to think about—in the recognition that the choice is yours to make and you alone have the power to make it.

Let us all commit to making that choice—to reminding ourselves, day-in-day-out, that This Is Water.

Wrapping Up

Summarizing the three key lessons to take home with you today:

Fight the Arrogance: When we allow our arrogance to win, we are the prisoner completely unaware of our state of imprisonment. When we fight the arrogance, we experience a richer, more complex, and more dynamic existence.
Reject the Default Setting: We all come with a default setting that places ourselves at the center of the universe and disallows any level of compassion or empathy. Rejecting the default setting breathes new life into our days.
Find True Freedom: Do not allow yourself to be enslaved by the mimetic worships of your default settings. True freedom is found in choosing how to think and what to think about.

This all leads to a single action item I humbly request you all take:

This week, when you inevitably encounter some situation in which you find yourself defaulting to a state of boredom, annoyance, or misery, pause a moment and consider how else you might choose to perceive the situation.

This simple act of defiance will compound if you let it.

You may find yourself experiencing new and unexpected joy in the banalities of life.

You may find yourself realizing that the water is pretty nice today...

For more, you can find the full speech audio here and the full transcript here .

Preorder now!

Reject the default and live by design. In this book, I offer a new way for you to think about your life. A new way to measure what matters, make better decisions, and design your life around the pillars that truly create lasting joy and fulfillment. ‍ No matter who you are, or where you are on your journey, this book is for you.

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This is Water by David Foster Wallace: The Cost of One Life for The Quality of Many

Categories: Book Review David Foster Wallace

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Analysis of “This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace

The speech “This Is Water” provided in the paper is an address to the students of Kenyon College made in 2005. In it, David Foster Wallace reviews some particularities of people’s minds and their unconscious attitude to the events and circumstances around them. The author uses the young fish asking for what water is as an example, through which he emphasizes how hard it may be to interpret simple things happening in daily lives. Considering the significance of such an understanding, young students are invited to pay specific attention to it. Therefore, it is critically important to identify the instances of default negative thinking, overcome them, control one’s attitude towards occurring events, and view them in all their complexity and with possible connotations.

A valuable idea expressed by the author is the need to acknowledge one’s tendency to assess the outside world from the standpoint of being the center of the universe. That is something like a “default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth” (Wallace). Such an attitude seems logical with all the objects and people surrounding an individual and influencing their lives. The author points out that being tired at work and busy with one’s thoughts and problems, a person slips into the feeling that all others are just obstacles preventing them from reaching immediate goals. Therefore, an individual can get annoyed at people in a supermarket, frustrated with traffic jams, numerous large vehicles occupying the road, as shown by the examples provided in the speech. All this demonstrates an inherent trend to view the surrounding world through the lens of oneself.

However, the unconscious attitude mentioned above can be countered by really thinking of the possible meanings and aspects of various events. As an example, the author notes that the driver of a vehicle cutting someone off in a traffic jam may be rushing his sick child to a hospital. Besides, the lady shouting at a supermarket could be taking care of her terminally ill husband. Nobody can ever know the real causes of other people’s behavior. Therefore, the author suggests that individuals should not think of the events through the prism of themselves and their superficial judgments. The apprehension of the endless differences and complexities of others’ lives would completely change a person’s attitude towards them.

Finally, the behavior of people is mainly defined by their beliefs. In this regard, the author urges us to find the correct object of worship. He notes that there is no true atheism since everybody believes in something. Such objects could easily be money, power, or achieving a perfect body. The author admits that these worships are natural and unconscious, with people slipping into them throughout their daily lives. However, they become a destructive factor as nobody can ever reach the final goal. There will always be those who are more powerful, beautiful, and prosperous. The utterly different worship is the one allowing people to be the masters of their “own tiny skull-sized kingdoms” (Wallace). That means being attentive to others, being able to care about them and sacrificing for them. Such worship brings the infinite freedom and grasp of eternal life values.

Through all these discussions and examples, the author urges the audience to contemplate the basic things surrounding everybody. He asks students not to slip into their unconscious mindsets. Constructing the meanings of the circumstances surrounding them would allow them to view the world from a different perspective and change their attitudes to others’ behavior. The goal of finding the correct values in one’s life, understanding what is essential, and learning how to achieve it is among the aims of education, which is a job of a lifetime for everybody.

Wallace, David F. “This is Water.” Kenyon College , 2020. Web.

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This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)

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David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech (Full Transcript and Audio)

Anthony V. Lombardo

Learn to Bend Reality!

Overview of David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech: 10 Lessons

1. The Default Setting

2. Awareness

4. Thinking

5. Freedom of Thought

6. Avoiding Arrogance

7. Real Freedom

8. Value of Routine

9. Sacrifice and Unselfishness

10. Conscious Living

5 Quotes From David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech

1. “This is water. This is water.”

2. “The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

3. “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 lit the stars.”

4. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”