Life is about learning as we go, and having no clear plan, other than taking the punches it throws at us. David Foster Wallace tells the Kenyon College students that the world around them is very big and that they are going to have to learn every day. During his commencement address, Wallace says the knowledge the Kenyon College graduates have up to this point in their lives will not carry them through everyday, they have to constantly try to learn more and grow.

Everyone worships different things and they are not wrong for choosing something different than you. Some people choose religion others choose materialistic things, and that is their decision. How a person becomes who they are is a long road tailored to them. Wallace tells a story of the two men sitting in the woods describing the same situation of being caught in a blizzard alone, and somehow getting saved by two passing Eskimos. Both believing it ended up the way it did for different reasons, one for religion and one for sheer coincidence. Wallace acknowledges that they would never agree on the same conclusion. The author says the things he believed in turned out to be totally wrong, but that is life and sometimes you have to find out things the hard way. That is where the learning part comes in, the graduates need to face everyday ready to be challenged because life is not the same in college as it is in the real world. Wallace tells the graduates that they should not worship power, because they will only end up feeling left behind in the world. The real focus he wants them to worship is freedom. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention... You sacrifice them over and over in the myriad petty, unsexy ways every day,” (XVI). Wallace wants us to prioritize, and that we eliminate with unimportant things of day to day life to get what our education has taught us. He wants us to believe in freedom and know that it is our choice to be what we want to be. The world is our oyster and is never permanent; what we experience in our everyday life is not the only thing it has to offer. The freedom to do what we want is a gift. Choosing your own path, and not being at the whim of someone’s desires, is what life's all about. We have our own knowledge that the world has given to us throughout years in school, and events that have happened to us. We must use those experiences to truly thrive and choose what to believe in. Our past knowledge does not determine what we worship, and just because we worship something now does not mean we will for our entire life. 

Being self centered is a natural habit and it is quite common for someone to put himself at the center of the universe, not taking into account anyone around him. Someone’s day could be going horribly around us and we have no idea if that is the case, so we can not jump to conclusions. By being educated he says we will be more aware of everything going on and we will not automatically assume the worst out of people. Wallace wants us to know that the world is a massive place, with so many different scenarios playing out daily. The college students have been taught throughout their lives basic social skills and tendencies, but Wallace wants to push them to grow. Wallace wants them to take the skills and push the limit of truly understanding we are one out of billions of people. We do not have to get mad for sitting in traffic because there could be an accident on the road ahead, with someone’s life hanging in the balance. The clerk at the supermarket could be struggling to make ends meet and she has to pay her bills at the end of her shift. We can never be sure what is happening in another person’s life and to judge someone based on the 30-second interaction is not what we should be about. He says that life does not have to be this way. We can, “[be] aware enough to give yourself a choice… then you will know there are better options” (Wallace XV). When we are younger it is more acceptable to be self centered because we do not know any better. As we grow to see what this world has to offer through knowledge, we should become more sympathetic towards other people and their situations. We are taught these values by our parents and our teachers growing up. Wallace wants the graduates of Kenyon college to recognize that they are not the center of the word, he wants them to understand there is more than just their problems. He believes you get to this recognition by being educated and pushing to learn more everyday. 

Wallace hopes the graduates do not get completely consumed by the adult responsibilities that is about to face them. Being an adult, we get locked into a routine that we do every day because growing up throughout school we did the same thing in different variations. Get up, eat breakfast, go to our jobs, work hard, then return home to do it over again. Wallace does not want the students to have the routine he wants them to continuously push the envelope and want to learn more every day. He says, “You graduating seniors do not have any clue… the parents and older folks know all too well what I’m talking about” (Wallace XIII). He wants the college students to know that their past years of studying and part time jobs is not how hard it’s going to get. They are going to have to work hard every single day, and they can not get into the rut of just going through the motions. Wallace gives a scenario of us going through life as a typical adult, with a job, and responsibilities. How we go to the same job, go to the same store, drive on the same freeways, but we never take into account the daily activities that we do. He wants the students to know that just because they have to be grown up, does not mean they have to get in the rut that most adults are in. This connects to the idea of education by not letting this aspect of our lives hold us back. Having a job and being responsible for a family is important but we would not be anywhere if people were not constantly changing. Life is full of choices, to choose to live life on default should not be one of them; instead we can use our knowledge to broaden our scope of life. He describes how we can broaden our levels of knowledge by becoming more attentive, disciplined, and able to sacrifice for someone else’s benefits, even if we do not want to.

David Foster Wallace wants the graduates of Kenyon College to strive every single day of their lives to become an educated member of society. There will be trials that they have to go through everyday, but they can not let life beat them by making them give up when it gets hard. They can not go into the tunnel vision of only paying attention to their own life because they will not strive as adults. We have the opportunity to use our knowledge and experiences to grow more as an individual. The students must understand that they are not the center of the world, everything does not revolve around them. Wallace wants the graduates to know that they can choose what they worship in their everyday lives and that not everyone worships the same thing as them. People have to become educated enough to choose what is important enough to them to believe in. Overall the address is meant to make the students aware that the world is constantly changing and we can never have too much knowledge. What we have experienced does not define us and what we will learn is not all that is out there.
