This Is Water

Speaker: David Foster Wallace Occasion: Commencement address, Kenyon College, May 21, 2005 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw Text of record: Kenyon’s own archive — https://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html One-line: The value of a liberal education is not knowledge but the capacity to choose what to pay attention to — because the mind’s factory setting is to experience everything as being about you, and that setting, left unexamined, is a slow death.

The argument

The speech begins with a parable — two young fish are asked by an older fish how the water is, and one of them eventually asks what water is. Wallace immediately disclaims the flattering reading: he is not the wise old fish. The point of the story is that the most obvious and important realities are the hardest to see and talk about, and that in adult life a banal platitude can carry life-or-death weight.

From there the address makes three moves.

One: the default setting. Wallace’s term for the mind’s factory configuration is deep, literal self-centredness — not a moral failing but an architectural fact, since there is no experience you have ever had that you were not at the centre of. He is careful to say this is not a lecture about virtue or compassion. It is a claim about defaults: the belief that you are the realest person in the room is hard-wired, and everything you perceive arrives pre-filtered through it.

Two: the supermarket. The long set piece — the tiring workday, the traffic, the crowded fluorescent store, the checkout line, the drive home — exists to relocate the whole question away from graduation-day abstraction. The petty, frustrating parts of adult life are precisely where the work of choosing happens, because they are where the default setting runs unopposed. Wallace’s alternative is not optimism but construction: the SUV that cut you off might be carrying a sick child; the screaming woman in line might have been up three nights with a dying husband. He is explicit that none of this is likely, and equally explicit that likelihood is not the point — “it just depends on what you want to consider.”

Three: everybody worships. The last movement is the hardest one and the reason the speech has outlived its occasion. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, Wallace argues, there is no such thing as not worshipping; the only choice is what. And nearly everything other than some deliberately chosen spiritual or ethical object “will eat you alive” — money never feels like enough, beauty guarantees you will feel ugly as it goes, power leaves you needing more of it to keep fear at bay, intellect leaves you feeling like a fraud about to be found out. The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are wicked but that they are unconscious: defaults you slip into a day at a time.

His conclusion redefines freedom against the version the graduates are about to be sold. The important kind is not the freedom to be “lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms” but the kind that involves attention, awareness, discipline, effort, and the unglamorous daily work of actually caring about other people. The alternative is the rat race — “the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

Wallace killed himself in September 2008. The speech was published as a short book in 2009, and its afterlife has been complicated by exactly the inspirational-poster treatment it spends its first two paragraphs trying to refuse.

Notable quotes

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

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.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

Archived text

Source pages saved locally against link rot, with a structural record of the address: ../attachments/this-is-water/this-is-water.md

Connections

• Attention — the speech’s actual subject. Wallace’s definition of education as learning “how to think” is explicitly a claim about control over what you attend to.
• Attention Economy — written before the phrase was in common use, and it reads now as the moral case that the attention economy’s critics later had to make in economic terms.
• Consumerism — the “worship money and things and you will never have enough” passage is the essay’s most-quoted line and its most direct attack on the default American reward function.
• Conformity — the default setting is conformity’s internal counterpart: not doing what others do, but never noticing that you could see the situation any other way.