




Sometimes lessons in life are best taught by bringing you down before you can be brought back up. In This is Water, David Foster Wallace starts off his speech by alarming the audience with a problem that everyone has, finding meaning in life. There is a simple solution, but he scares the graduates at the beginning of the speech so that when he does gives them advice, they will listen. David Foster Wallace uses a pessimistic tone towards the start of his speech to set up the listener to be open about his advice in living a life of consciously thinking that they are not the center of the universe in order to achieve happiness.

Being told that you are going to live a meaningless life with no control over your thoughts should scare anyone into changing how they live. David Foster Wallace’s speech starts in a negative tone as he tells all the graduates that they have no clue how to think the right way. He states “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” (Wallace, XI). Here Wallace summarizes exactly what the graduates are most likely thinking about his pessimistic descriptions of adulthood. By portraying life as a gloomy, meaningless sequence of events that everyone has to live out, he is trying to scare the listeners into not wanting to grow up thinking this way. Each person lives a life full of frustrating, repetitive events that are ultimately pointless. He alarms the graduates with this information because he is setting them up for the advice he gives later in the speech. The life he portrays through examples of daily life at a supermarket are not favorable and most would not want to live like this. Happiness is something everyone desires, but the automatic way of thinking does not give you joy. How might someone ever achieve happiness if they lived their lives how they were naturally designed? 

Most children wish to grow up as fast as possible. Having freedom and the ability to do anything seems amazing. David Foster Wallace lets the graduate students know this is not the case. Wallace describes daily life very pessimistically. He talks about how horrible day to day life is as an adult with his example of going to a supermarket. Throughout his detailed explanation of this the crowd gets a feel for what the next part of their lives are going to resemble. Then Wallace lets them know that it does not get any better by saying, “many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides” (Wallace, XIV). He sets the audience up for his advice by alarming them into imagining that this is what the adult world resembles. Nobody wants to grow up slogging away, working through the drudgeries that make up life. People live like this because they do not know how to live differently. After talking about how dreadful life is when the audience becomes grownups he tells them it does not have to be this way. Here Wallace states, “The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations” (Wallace, XV). If he were to simply start off his speech by telling them how to think, nobody would have listened because they would all still believe that they could think. After going through some of the most mentally challenging years of their lives the graduates are rather confident that they can think the correct way. 

One person’s worth is not greater than anybody else’s. Everyone has their own annoying challenges they must conquer throughout the day. David Foster Wallace’s ultimate goal of this speech was to make the listeners understand this. He uses negative examples of going to a supermarket as an adult on purpose so he can refer to it later in the speech after the audience knows about thinking consciously. He proclaims, “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” (Wallace, XV). By setting up the supermarket to seem like the worst possible place that could ever exist, and then telling the students it does not have to be like this, Wallace achieves his goal in convincing the listeners to live out a life of conscious thinking. He knows if he were to just go start off his speech talking about how wonderful the supermarket can be if you have a different perspective the listeners would have been confused and not willing to accept to his advice. If someone were to give another person the advice to “think consciously if you want to be happy later in life” the person receiving the advice would not take it. Wallace knew the audience would react the same way, which is why he chose to start his speech the way he did. He effectively scares the students into wanting to follow his advice on making a conscious effort to realize that they are not the center of the universe.

By using negative examples of what adulthood looks like towards the beginning of his speech, David Foster Wallace prepares the listener so they will not be reluctant when he gives them advice.  He wants all the graduates to realize that bad things happen no matter what, and your happiness in life is determined by how you react them.