David Foster Wallace’s, “This is Water” is a speech that dares us to stray away from the normal standards and think in ways that we as humans are not accustomed to. He starts by explaining that every experience we as people encounter in life is viewed as if our single life is the center of the universe.  He preaches we can do no harm, and that every daily annoyance is a personal insult to us through the form of how someone acts.  For example, the man who cut you off on the highway did so just to insult you. This is how people truly think without ever stopping to acknowledge the fact that there are other people with other agendas other than their own.  This is largely because that is how society teaches us to think. Mr. Wallace dares us to put in our minds that we are not the center of the universe. And that in fact we are actually just another planet circling another sun, and are therefore somewhat meaningless in the grand scheme of things. He challenges us to think that maybe the person who cut you off is doing so because he has an emergency he has to tend to in a rush. And in fact has no knowledge of your existence whatsoever. In a small parable he shares about an atheist and a religious man, he examines the reality of worship. He explains that everyone worships something, and that no matter what deity(s) you worship, a set of moral and ethical principles are in place in your life. He says believing in something will give our lives meaning and fullness. On the other hand, he shares that people who worship themselves, money, power, or anything of that nature have no fullness in their life. He shares that these people will die “a million deaths” before they are finally put into the ground. Wallace wants us to be the kind of person we want to know and explain to us how to think differently and why we should.

I think the reason why Wallace wants to challenge our minds to think differently is because deep down he would've liked to see this change in the world. He explains that he knows people are used to thinking this way and that they will never make it a permanent way of thinking. “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” (Wallace 2). He thinks that the world we grew up in will forever have this negative impact in our brains and that there is no way we could ever change our initial thoughts, but possibly rethink them. If we learn different ways to think, as in “exercising control over how and what to think”, then Wallace says we won’t have to live our adult lives being “dead and unconscious” (Wallace 3). He takes us through an everyday adult situation about going to the grocery store after work and all the mental obstacles our minds create for us at the end of the day. To the reader it sounds painful and unfulfilling. But if we basically make excuses for the way that people act, we will have a more peaceful mindset in that we develop sympathy for the woman yelling at her kid in the checkout line because she might have stayed up the past three straight nights to deal with something depressing.

This speech revolves around the central theme that most people live in their own world oblivious of the world around them.  In fact Wallace refers to this mode quite often as he states at one point in the speech: “being stuck in cruise control”.  The best example from the speech is when Wallace refers to the fish that are unaware of what water is.  Humans are largely the same in respects to our modern society.  Humans are like the fish and the world in which we live is our water.  We move through it everyday as we go through our day to day tasks while the world around us changes and flows. However, we just keep moving absentmindedly through it as if it’s not even there.  This is largely because the society that we live in today is more concerned with its own personal agenda rather than the betterment of the society as a whole.  Wallace does a fantastic job of bringing this to light in his speech.