David Foster Wallace: I Wish You Way More Than Luck

This is DFW’s Com­mence­ment address to Kenyon Col­lege in 2005. Posted because I find it an immensely insight­ful way to look at life.

(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 “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 manœu­vre 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.”

“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.