The parable “This is Water,” uses fish as symbols to illustrate the lack of social, self and environmental awareness in society. David Foster Wallace uses the story in his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College to convey discontent with a modern culture that enables egotism and self-absorption rather than promoting substance and character. He cautions his audience of becoming too self-involved while promoting individuality, generally being aware of one’s environment & influences and consciousness of other perspectives. The speech also notes the difficulty of navigating everyday life in a world with increasingly diverse sets of experiences and conflicting preferences.

Wallace mostly attributes the intense focus on self in today’s society simply to human nature and people’s inability to separate their own mindset, which is so emphasized since one can only fully experience one’s own perspective, from the endlessly variable preferences of others. As he explains, “It’s a matter … of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting this way which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self” (Wallace XII). He implies that the natural focus on oneself as one develops to adulthood is a result of the lack of mental capacity to recognize other viewpoints. He scorns what he considers failure to mature out of petty selfish habits and obsession with power. Wallace promotes values of individuality and self-consciousness and indicates his disapproval of conformist attitudes and materialistic obsessions. He repeatedly defines individuality as the ability to train oneself to know how to think, as well as the freedom of choice in what to think of. Nearing the end of the speech he mentions “in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism … Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship” (Wallace XV). His conclusive remarks indicate a sense of hope that people may choose to shift their focuses away from themselves and initiate in themselves’ healthier and more fulfilling interests; that what we choose to think about not only affects how we perceive situations, but how we derive meaning from them.

The speaker also accentuates the essentiality of consciousness of influence and one’s immediate surroundings; the present environment. He frequently references the importance of the transition from an egocentric to a more comprehensive perspective, which must be done by the observation of what is currently happening, both individually and in a more broad, societal sense. The speech’s centric parable emphasizes this the most clearly, and as Wallace elaborates, “the most obvious, important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about” (Wallace X). He underscores the importance of the most basic awareness and attention to different occurrences, implying that people are so often absorbed in their own thought space that they fail to even notice things happening in front of them, especially with the advent of both portable and entertainment technologies. Wallace further analyzes this implication by offering, “Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education … is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff … instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside of me” (Wallace XII).  The statement suggests that people tend to often regard their own interpretations of different experiences as more valuable than the actual experience itself. 

Wallace uses the speech predominantly as a vehicle for a more deeper analysis of the familiar idea of being conscious of other viewpoints. His method of detaching oneself from a restrictive, self-centered perspective intrinsically involves learning more about how others think, not just learning that people have different preferences. He notes near the beginning of the speech that people often perceive disagreements simply; “the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people” (Wallace XI). He encourages his audience to examine why people have certain reactions and what provokes certain thoughts in them. The only real way for one to acquire social or intellectual wisdom is to observe some of the interminable amount of variables in human communication that are affected by personality, taste, and intelligence among many other traits. He resolutely states, “As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired” (Wallace XI), disregarding the notion that a person’s outlook can be simplified to a static characteristic.

Given the medium in which Wallace’s ideas are presented, they are translated precisely for the effect of easy comprehension and avoidance of making his message overly convoluted. Wallace acknowledges the simplicity of his topics in order to subvert simpler preconceptions of common values. Thus, the commencement speech serves as not only an effective lesson in the complexities of human intelligence but a generally agreeable set of principles that promotes balanced social development.