
David Foster Wallace was an intellectual and analytical writer of acclaimed and medaled works of literature, but, yet, how he perceived the world led him to take his own life at the age of 46. Three years before Wallace committed suicide, he gave the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon University a very uncharacteristic commencement speech called “This is Water.” He emphasized mental health and exercising control over your thoughts. In his speech, he creates the idea of a “default setting” in which, he describes it as, “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” (Wallace XII). According to Wallace, the “default setting” turns on when you do not choose how to think, but simply allow for the unconscious self-centeredness to take over. A word that Wallace uses often is choice and the difference between choice and the idea of the “default setting.” In “This is Water,” Wallace uses the phrase “default setting” repeatedly to develop his argument that you must choose to be conscious of how you see the world.

Another word for the “default setting” is self-centeredness. Wallace describes, “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” (XII). According to Wallace, if you experience life through the default setting, you look at situations and people and how they affect you, with no concern for how you are affecting them. The default setting puts you in the center of your world, but Wallace argues that you must choose to sacrifice your natural selfishness to focus on others. If you choose to look at the world through a perspective lens, you allow yourself to have consideration for others and you become more aware of your surroundings. By succumbing to the default setting, you would be allowing yourself to see the world as it revolves around you, but, if you choose to be conscious of your thoughts, you will see the world more clearly.

Wallace also talked about the importance of worshipping or, more specifically, the significance of choosing what has meaning to you personally and what doesn’t. For example, Wallace explains, “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…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive” (XVI). Wallace believed that whatever you grew to worship would consume you and choosing what to worship was not only important, but it would determine your future as a human being. Some people who submit to the “default setting” worship money, power, fame, or beauty and get consumed by things that have little subsistence or no meaning. Furthermore, they are not consciously aware of what is really valuable about life to them as individuals. Conversely, those who seek out what is of value to them personally, worship something that doesn’t necessarily consume their life, but enhances it.  Therefore, it is essential to carefully choose which values, principles, or ideas to worship because they become what gives your life sustenance.

Wallace talks of the ability to choose to be conscious of your thoughts and of your surroundings rather than to “default” to unconscious thinking. He uses the analogy of being in traffic after a long day of work. He goes in detail about the disgust and anger he would probably have, just like the rest of us, at all the horrible drivers in front of him who would make his trip home even longer than necessary, but then he proceeds to say:

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 his kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am… I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that…people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do. (XV)  

By giving this analogy, Wallace tries to explain the importance of being aware of your thoughts so you can choose to think differently. Thinking in the default setting entails an automatic way of thinking that impacts the way you view situations and others. In this case, Wallace was angry and aggravated at everyone on the road until he stopped to consciously consider what they might be feeling. In conclusion, the default setting is an unconscious way of thinking that can be surpassed if you control your thoughts and choose to think differently.

Wallace’s main goal of this commencement speech was to express to the graduates of Kenyon College the importance of perception and the essentiality of controlling how you think about the world around you. For Wallace, it was depression that deprived him of power over his own mind, but he wanted to advise the graduates of the class of 2008 to experience a life different from his own. He demanded from his audience that they all must be the masters of their own minds, not vice versa. He communicated the idea that if they surrendered to the “default setting,” they would not have authority over their own thoughts; that they would be a slave to the master of the mind. The world as they would unconsciously, selfishly see it would not be of their own creation, but possibly hateful, repetitive, or unhappy. However, if they choose how to perceive society and its people, they would not fail to be the commanders of their own minds and the determinants of their own happiness. The self-attained freedom of thought and, more notably, the idea of choice are two things that any one person needs to live a life that is their own. 
