Your Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master - David Foster Wallace

greetings thanks and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005 If anybody feels like perspiring I'd invite you to go ahead because I'm sure going to 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 that 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 of 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 meaning to try to explain why the degree you're about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff so let's talk about the single most pervasive cliche 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 lacked hearing this and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you've 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 gonna posit to you that the liberal arts cliche turns out not to be insulting at all 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 others 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 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 honoring by and they showed me the way back to King it's easy to run the story through a kind of 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 in 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 guys 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 hardwired like height or shoe size or automatically absorbed from the culture like language as if how we construct meaning we're not actually a matter of personal intentional choice plus there's the matter of arrogance the non-religious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with this prayer for help true there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogantly certain of their own interpretations - they're probably even more repulsive than atheists at least to most of us but religious dogma this problem is exactly the same as the stories unbeliever blind certainty a closed 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 - 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 talk 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 hardwired into our boards at birth think about it there is no experience you have had that you are not at 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 or 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 at least in my own case is that it enables my tendency to over at electrolyzed stuff to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's 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 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 cliche 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 cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master this like many cliches soul a man done exciting on the surface actually expresses a great and terrible truth it is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms on 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 happened 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 a workday 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 fluorescently lit and infused with soul-killing music 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 overlit stores confusing aisles to find the if you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired hurried people with carts etc etc cutting stuff out because it's a long ceremony and eventually you get all your supper supplies except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout 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 has 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 lines front and you pay for your food and get told to have a nice day in a voice that is the absolute voice of death and 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 literary parking lot and then you have to drive all the way home through slow heavy SUV intensive rush-hour traffic etc etc 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 going to 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 good 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 non-human they seem in the checkout or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cellphones in the middle of the line and look at how deeply 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 SUVs and Hummers and v12 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 this is an example of how not to think biggest 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 futures fuel and probably screwing up the climate and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are and how modern consumer these consumer society just sucks and so on and so forth you get the idea if I choose to think this way in the store and on the freeway fine lots of us do except say 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 the thing is that of course there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations in this traffic all these vehicles stuck 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 is 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 he's in a way 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 and that some of these people probably have much harder more tedious or painful lives than I did again please don't think I'm giving you moral advice or that I'm saying you're 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 were 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 fad 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 her husband who's dying of bone cancer or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles 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 who and what is really important if you want to operate 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 think how to pay attention then you will know you have 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 lit the Stars love fellowship the mystical oneness of all things deep down not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true the only thing that's capital T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it this I submit 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 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 worshiping 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 @jc or Allah be it Yahweh 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 own 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 plant you on one level we all know this stuff already it's been codified as myths proverbs cliches epigrams parables the skeleton of every great story the whole trick is keeping the truth upfront 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 look the insidious thing about these forms of worship 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 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 on the fuel of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the 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 own 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 talked about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying 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 little unsexy ways every day that is real freedom that is being educated and understanding how to think the alternative is unconsciousness the default setting the rat race the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing 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 some finger wagging dr. Laura sermon none of the 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 this is water it's unimaginably hard to do this to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out which means yet another grand cliche turned out to be true your education really is the job of a lifetime and it commences you

Channel: After Skool

Views: 1,614,233

Rating: 4.9217892 out of 5

Keywords: this is water, david foster wallace, adulthood, mental health, liberal arts education, worthless degree, how to think, amazing speech, life changing, after skool

Id: OsAd4HGJS4o

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/diditmakesound]

Also in music form or transcript. If I could get y’all to watch one thing, this might be it.

It clearly discusses ‘how to think’, critically and highlights ways we don’t.. ways most never will.

[u/Athingcantbenamed]

This is something I listen to once a year or so and it gets me every time.