Reflections on David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”

Few commencement addresses capture the zeitgeist of a generation as David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. While commencement speeches often veer toward the clichéd, offering standard life advice to graduates, Wallace’s approach was starkly different. His speech, profound in its simplicity, delved into the nuances of everyday life, urging young adults to cultivate a conscious awareness of the world around them.

At its core, “This is Water” centers around the idea of choice — specifically, the choice of how we perceive and react to the mundane aspects of daily existence.

Wallace begins with an allegory: two young fish swim by an older fish who asks, “How’s the water?” After swimming on, one young fish turns to the other and asks, “What the heck is water?” The metaphor illustrates the idea that the most obvious realities around us, those that constitute our default mode of understanding, often go unnoticed.

Wallace’s main argument is that a significant part of adult life is merely being aware that there’s water all around. This means recognizing the automatic settings we operate on — the self-centeredness, the knee-jerk annoyance at petty frustrations, the default setting that leads us to believe we are the center of the world. These settings aren’t necessarily our fault; they’re hardwired into our ways of thinking. But, Wallace posits, a true education provides us with the ability to choose an alternative.

And this choice is no small matter. It’s the difference between moving through life passively, succumbing to the tedious, frustrating, and routine, and living in a way that’s conscious and compassionate. For Wallace, the freedom to decide how to think and what to pay attention to is the true essence of personal freedom. It’s not about banishing our default settings, but acknowledging them and then choosing to see things differently, even if it means simply understanding that other people are just as real as we are and that they have their own frustrations and struggles.

But making that choice is far from easy. It requires consistent effort, a near-constant reminder that “this is water.” It’s about breaking free from the automatic responses that have been ingrained in us and choosing to see the bigger picture. It’s about empathy, understanding, and patience. Wallace doesn’t present this as a moral directive but rather as a practical one. By adjusting our default settings, we can lead a life that feels more meaningful and less burdensome.

However, it’s essential to note that “This is Water” is not just about individual transformation. It’s also a critique of the broader cultural values that promote certain default settings. Wallace touches upon the idea of worship, arguing that everyone worships something — be it money, power, beauty, or intellect. Yet, the dangers lie in unconscious worship, in allowing our default settings to determine the direction of our lives. True freedom, for Wallace, involves recognizing these values for what they are and making conscious choices about what we decide to worship.

In closing, David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of conscious living. It’s a call to action, urging us to recognize the water we’re swimming in and choose how we navigate through it. It’s about understanding the default settings that shape our perceptions and challenging ourselves to see beyond them. In a world increasingly characterized by distraction, Wallace’s words offer a timeless message about the power of attention, awareness, and choice. They prompt us to consider what it truly means to live a meaningful life and how the decisions we make, both big and small, shape our reality.

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