"This is Water", by David Foster Wallace, is a speech that fits perfectly with its intended audience. The commencement speech fits what new students going into the world need to know so well, it is hard to believe this has not become a model for these types of speeches given since. Beginning from the first sentence, Wallace tells stories and explains his view on the world. The story that gives this speech its title is a great summary of the message Wallace is trying to get across. Fish that have lived in the water their whole life and yet do not know what it is is a metaphor for what Wallace calls the "default setting", or our way of seeing and interpreting everything through the lens of self. In his commencement speech, Wallace asks us to change our default setting of self-centeredness into a freedom with attention for others and the world around us.

The first paragraph of Wallace's speech sets up the message that he wants his audience to receive. Fish that have lived their whole life in water yet do not even know what it is is a not so subtle metaphor for the way we perceive the world around us. We live and interact with other people every day. However, we may not realize that every person we meet has individual thoughts and feelings that may be different than ours. We are not the center of the universe as our default setting would lead us to believe. Wallace introduces this idea to us quickly because it is the foundation for the rest of his message to come.

The second parable is what Wallace describes as an "average day", where you wake up, go to work, the grocery store, and go home all the while feeling angry, tired, and unsettled in your everyday routine. With this second parable, Wallace again shows how he wants us to perceive the world by asking us to stop and think about what we are doing before we go into our "natural setting" and get overly angry over things such as the grocery store or traffic. By placing us as listeners in a situation we can all imagine like this, Wallace wants us to feel as if we were actually in this position before reminding us that all of this does not happen only to us. He reminds us that all of these other people are human as well and are probably feeling the same way as us.

With his use of parables throughout the commencement speech, Wallace further emphasizes his points about the way we naturally feel. His message that he wants to convey to the audience is that we all need to stop viewing ourselves as the absolute center of the world when in fact every other person out there also has this self-centric point of view. He uses the parables to great effect to get this point across. 

Another strategy that Wallace uses in this speech is to place us in situations that we have all been in. He makes us feel one way, how we would feel in our default setting, and then shows us how to improve our world view. In one instance, Wallace describes something we can all relate to and know how frustrating it can be: a traffic jam. Wallace shows us how we would normally think in a situation like this, criticizing all of the other drivers for various reasons and generally getting all worked up over nothing, and thinking pessimistically about what our future will hold. Wallace uses the technique of getting us to feel emotion through his storytelling, then asking us to change the way we view the situation. Here he asks us to place ourselves in other people's positions, saying that any number of things could be happening to these people that causes them to behave in ways we might view as annoying or unnecessary. As he says, we could even be the ones who are actually in their way. If someone is on the way to the hospital what they are doing is more important than us in that moment. He asks us to look at things from someone else's perspective before we judge them. 

Another instance in which we are placed in a familiar position is when Wallace describes a trip to the supermarket. We have all been there, too close to others for comfort, waiting behind people who are not in as much of a hurry as you, listening to someone else's kids be much too loud and energetic for something like a grocery store run. The lines are too long, the cashier is unfriendly, and then you have to drive through traffic all the way back home. Describing a miserable situation like this, Wallace then asks us to change the way we feel in the situation. If we are in our default setting, any trip to the grocery store will make us miserable and hate the world and people around us. 

The point that Wallace is trying to make by verbalizing these common situations is that they do not have to be what we always view them as. If we choose to look at the world in a different light, then these situations we will undoubtedly find ourselves in will not be as unbearable as we are used to, and could even become meaningful or sacred. Wallace says that the only thing that is true is that we decide how to perceive what we are going through. We decide how we are going to experience our everyday situations. If we look at these through a lens other than our default setting, then hopefully we can learn to see the world in a new way.

Wallace also mentions his belief that atheism does not actually exist in our adult society. Whether it be god and religion, or material things, or even parts of ourselves, we all worship something. He mentions this to show how if we are always concerned about ourselves, we will fall back into the trap of viewing the world through only our point of view. If we can experience things with other people, than we can experience what he calls true freedom. 

David Foster Wallace tells us plainly that we need to avoid our default setting. If we can focus on others instead of ourselves, then we can have more happiness in our lives. The commencement speech he gave perfectly embodied what someone who is new to the real world would need to know. Even though all of our times will not be joyous and entertaining, if we can change the way we perceive the world it can become more live able and even something that is liberating. We may all be fish, but the goal of Wallace's speech is to get us to understand what water actually is.