The literary text that I chose to analyze is “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace. In this text, he uses a lot of examples and deep description throughout his speech to help you visualize the colloquial situations in which I tend to think more about myself than others. He is saying that I need to get out of our “default-setting” of being stubborn and start to be more selfless and optimistic in today’s society. 

In one part of the text, he sets up a visual depiction of an typical person’s day. They get up for work for hours and then they want to go home but forgot they don’t have food at home. So then they have to go to the supermarket and buy food, but on the way there there’s a lot of traffic. On top of that, when you finally arrived to the supermarket, its swarmed with people and et cetera. I basically interpreted that the “default-setting” is to get mad and be upset because I am constantly thinking about myself and not the things going on around me that we can’t necessarily control. I inferred that he wants us to believe that I should think of other things before I get mad because I’m not fully aware of what the other person’s situation is. For example, back to the person driving on the road; the person may be driving slowly on the road because they got in a terrible car accident, or have high auto-insurance. Or on the contrary, maybe they’re driving fast because they’re in a hurry for an more important reason than our self; such as they’re rushing someone to the hospital because they’re on the verge of death, or they’re about to be late to work etc. In these situations, we don’t see what’s happening on the other side of the fence because we’re too busy worried about our self, our emotions, our feelings that we don’t think outside of our “default-setting” and consider the reasons for other peoples’ actions. 

Another example, Foster Wallace was talking about a “fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line.” And then the next line says, “Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer.”  In this case, you aren’t really thinking of what else is happening in her life. At that moment, you’re just thinking of her yelling at this little kid in a very belligerent manner. Their “default-setting” doesn’t know that her husband is dying of cancer or that she’s the lady “who helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness”.  I just interpreted this as to we pay so much attention to ourselves that we don’t seem to think about what’s not blatant and the underlying issues that someone else may be faced with.

I believe that the moral of David Foster Wallace commencement speech was to tell us that we should start being more aware, selfless, and more optimistic. I also think that we should take from his speech that we need to think before we let our emotions show, and start to consider underlying things that are going on that we can’t control in our environment and the people around us. We need to get more out of our “default-setting” and begin to think of things that we can’t control. He wants us to think of the unthinkable and think outside of the box. We all are born selfish and all want more for ourselves but we also need to be cognizant of other unstoppable factors that might have an effect on others.
