
Starting to live on your own is a huge step in anyone’s life.  It is a transition into the independent side of life, no one is here to hold your hand anymore.  You are ultimately on your own to adapt to this new way of life and to possibly get an education.  Throughout the experience you are taught how to think through success and failure.  It is how you interpret the experience that will determine if you are actually going to learn or benefit from the experience.  David Foster Wallace’s speech “This is Water” is an accurate example of how self-arrogance, negative reactions to experience, and false sense of freedom are naturally imbedded in the someone’s thoughts.  He gives relatable examples of how people think naturally and then how they should exercise their thoughts. 

Wallace’s speech is mainly about the point of his college experience with liberal arts, which is to teach him how to think.  To teach awareness and discipline to students, to be humble and understanding.  It is very easy to always think about yourself, to think you are always right and everyone around you is wrong.  Self-arrogance is huge today and Wallace even uses an example of himself and how he sometimes is arrogant.  “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 center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.” (Wallace XII).  This makes the listeners more comfortable with themselves because Wallace also makes mistakes and has these thoughts sometimes.  This also shows the reader how automatic it is for people to have these thoughts.  The reason why this speech is effective is because of how Wallace relates to the students on their level so they can understand where he is coming from. 

In David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” the term default setting to describe how people think. “If I choose to think this way in a store or on the freeway, fine.  Lots of us do.  Except thinking this way tends to be easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice.  It is my natural default setting.” (Wallace ZIV).  The majority of the time he uses this term it is describing the negativity in people’s thoughts.  He uses the example of a boring adult day where everyone around you seems to be miserable and suffering.  How the people driving these huge cars that have terrible fuel economy are in the wrong.  But the conclusion you make from the driver seat of your car has an extremely low chance of being correct.  There is an infinite number of things that factor into each person’s decision.  Yes, he might cut you off, yes, he is burning up fossil fuels quickly, and yes, he is producing tons of toxic gases and releasing them into the atmosphere but just because you see three things that you don’t like doesn’t mean he is a bad or ignorant person.  There can be a multitude of different combinations of reasons why he owns a huge car that outweighs your weak minded observation from the front seat of your car.   You have absolutely no idea why he made the decisions he makes.  Wallace asks us to be observant and think of all the possibilities and not just stick with our own self-centered conclusion.  People lean towards the negative side of things in situations because they are attracted to seeing other people be wrong or fail.  People perceive the world through their eyes, not anyone else’s.  Since everyone has their own experiences it is natural for people to only be aware of one side of the situation, their side.  Throughout the speech Wallace uses capitalization to emphasize his point of how common selfishness is and how people think it’s all about them because humans are so use to perceiving things from their point of view.  “About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is in my way.” (Wallace XIV).  You have to exercise your brain and the way you think.  It takes repetition and practice to think of other reasons of why a person did something.  Wallace states that This default setting has enslaved people, and they are completely unaware of it because they haven’t been taught how to think or they don’t care.  It all comes back to what you think about and how you interpret the world around you. 

In the final section of the speech Wallace emphasizes how we choose to think, and how our choices on how to think determine our freedom.  “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 freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.” (Wallace XV).  He then goes deeper into the meaning of true freedom by talking about things that people try to enhance or worship.  He uses the word worship to give you a mental image of how people feel towards certain things.  “It’s the truth Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.” (Wallace XVI).  If you spend your whole life trying to look beautiful you will always be chasing this image that you will never reach.   “Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need evermore power over others to numb 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.” (Wallace XVI).  The time you have alive on this earth is limited and the selfish decisions and thoughts you have throughout the day won’t count for anything once you are dead.    Everything that he pointed out in these quotes is temporary and no matter what you try to do to be the best at something you will always end up losing.  Later in the speech Wallace gives the overall meaning of freedom and education.

In this speech Wallace gives very visual and relatable examples to show us how we think, and how we should think.  He teaches us that awareness is one of the main components of how we should think.  Being aware of all the possibilities and not just going with the first negative thought that comes to your head.  Everyone has their own point of view and their own way of interpreting experience.  So our job is to try to be more open and accepting towards certain things because we might not know the real reason behind it.  Wallace hopes to change the way people look and perceive things because the default setting is unhealthy.