The autonomic nervous system in the body are the automatic functions of the body such as sweating when it’s hot, or other involuntary actions. More often than not it is easy to slip into a daydream state, just sitting down or walking or even driving but not putting any thought into these natural things. This is the type of automatic thinking that the autonomic systems of the body do. In David Foster Wallace’s speech “This is Water,” he uses hyperbole to convey that thinking involves our control over what and how we think throughout our lives.

In the example that David Foster Wallace uses about the believer and the non-believer having a conversation is a prime example of this. Before the “didactic little story” about the blizzard even begins, the non-believer already has the concept in his mind that there is no God and he chooses not to believe otherwise (XI). Throughout his life, he has probably encountered many people who try to change his mind about what he believes but he has done it for so long now that he no longer questions his beliefs, he just knows that is what he will always think. The same goes for the believer. Neither one plans on changing what they think or believe based on what the other says because they have “two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience” (XI). Their object is now just to convince others around them that their way of thinking is correct and why it is correct. 

Once the story is being told, you can really see the one-sided thinking of both of the men. As the events of the story are unfolding the believer only sees God working using the random people as a vessel and an answer to the non-believer’s prayer. His problem is that he has a “blind certainty, a close mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up” (XII). The non-believer does the same in being “so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help” (XII). Neither of the men stop to think that maybe the other man is right. They do not stop to consider the other person’s point of view because their mind is stuck. The default settings of their brain is to continue to believe what they have up until this point in their life.

Wallace uses this example to prove that most times we have a preset thought or train of thinking when it comes to topics that are instilled in us in our life. Much like this example, we are cut off to others opinions and thoughts because of the “arrogant” thoughts that we have and our “lack of critical awareness” (XII). We think involuntarily about certain situations and Wallace tells us to defer away from this thoughtless process and turn to putting actual effort into our thoughts. We can choose in this example to listen to the other person’s thoughts to see it from their point of view even if we do not agree with it.

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe,” Wallace says (XII). The world that we know revolves around us and not anyone else. Since we were born, that is all that we know. When we think about events that have happened in the past or are currently happening, we see the effect they have on us and we do not take the time to think about how they affect others because all we have known is a life in which we are the most “important person in existence” in (XII). The exaggeration of the way that we “tend to be automatically sure of” the fact that our personal feelings are the only thing that matters is telling us how we do not think about our thoughts (XII). We just go through the motions of being completely self-centered without taking time to stop and think about how our actions affect other people around us. If we would make a conscious effort to think about how we perceive the world, then we would realize that we cannot just go through life thinking that the world revolves around us.

In the grocery store scenario, Wallace uses hyperbole to discuss how we see every situation that we are in as a disruption to our world. He explains very dramatically how we are able to go through the motions of getting a “white-collar, college-graduate” job first(XIII). These jobs are typical nine to five jobs, Monday through Friday and are the ideal office jobs for graduate students. He then explains that we get irritated and bored with the day to day living of this standard job and then when we are tired and have to make a stop at the grocery store through its “crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot” (XIV). We make so much out of these ordinary situations and make them out to be terrible experiences for us and that is normal thinking. It would take more for us to stop and realize that maybe the clerk has had a bad day or that the people around us have had other issues that they are also dealing with in their lives.

Our natural way to think is that the world revolves around us. It takes effort to think about other people and the effect that our attitudes and actions have on them. In this speech, Wallace uses hyperbole to better illustrate to us the fact that we think in this way “day in and day out” without even recognizing it (XIII). We never stop to think how we could be effect other people because we are not “hard-wired” that way, but by reading the exaggerations in this speech we can better understand and see how our thoughts, actions, and mindset seem on the outside (XII). Wallace says “the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded,” and he predicts that if we do not heed the advice he gives us that we will find out “the hard way” as he did (XII). Once we make a conscious effort to notice our thinking, then we will make an effort to change the way we think and thus, the way we act toward all people that we may encounter.
