 In the speech, “This is Water”, David Foster Wallace touches upon the subject of adult life and how overwhelmingly long and boring it will seem, but he later says that it is only those with a liberal arts degree are most fit to survive this boring life ahead of them because they’re able to look at situations with another perspective. As an outsider to Wallace’s life, one can look at Wallace and say how he thought of life as worthless through his constant belittling of adult life by saying that it is boring and repetitive, therefore his speech is just touching upon his own beliefs of life in general. Once he starts relaying his beliefs to the audience, it creates a conflict of interest becauses he almost betrays his idea that adult life is dependent on one’s personal perception of everyday life. By analyzing this text for key concepts and repetition of words, one would be able to see how much Wallace focuses on making a point about perception and how different it can be for a wide variety of people, but in a way he is being hypocritical because he is pressing his views on perception upon the audience.

The main concept of his speech begins to show through when he first introduces the story of the religious man and the atheist and the story goes on to talk about how the atheist prayed to God in a terrible blizzard he was stuck in and all that happened was a group of eskimos came to help him out of the blizzard, but the religious man was looking at him astounded that he still believed that that group of eskimos weren’t sent by God (Wallace). So basically, the moral of that story was that the two men had two different perceptions of the same event. This is important to his point in the speech by showing how there are always different ways to look at a situation. This is the point that Wallace was trying to make with this speech, but the point of that small story also suggests how Wallace is hypocritical to talk so much about differing perceptions when he is telling the graduating students that it is their duty to be open-minded to perception, while he is not being open-minded about their perception of his speech because of his constant use of “I” and his assumption that so many people think like his automatic setting which is shown in the quote ”Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice.”(Wallace)

Later in the speech when he is actually going over a string of events that occur in day to day life as an adult. He blatantly starts to suggest different scenarios that some of these people on the road may be going through when they cut him off. For example, “Or that Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way”(Wallace), shows that he himself is looking at different ways that he can perceive such an everyday occurrence. This shows that even he who thinks of adult life as boring and repetitive is able to or can perceive such various solutions to issues that an everyday person would be aggravated by, but again thats about him and he is still technically pushing the graduating class to consider life as he does or at least should. The problem is he does not follow what he continues to push the graduating class to consider doing in adult life and this is proven when he says “Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks…”(Wallace)

In the third to last paragraph, he brings up perception again because he discusses how all people worship something. In the sentence“The only choice we get is what to worship”(Wallace), he brings up an interesting point about choice and he’s right to suggest that choice is what leads people to perceive what they would like to perceive, not just in religious context but also in everyday life. He worships this idea that he is hinting at throughout his speech, which is not exactly open-mindedness of what other people may worship because this speech can have an impact on the perceptions of the intended audience of the speech; some people may choose not to worship anything at all, which is not worship.

We see him being hypocritical again with his repetition of words, like in his seventh paragraph when he starts using “YOU” or “YOUR” about five times through one sentence. The sentence “The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor”(Wallace), suggests that he is again persuading the audience that society defaults to self-centeredness as a sort of perception of one’s possessions both physically and figuratively, but someone in the audience may not think with the self-centeredness that he begins talking about in the quote above. In this speech, he even says that he himself still thinks with the self-centeredness presented in the quote above when he says “Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.”(Wallace) He cannot persuade someone into doing something that he doesn’t do himself.

He uses repetition of words again when he starts talking about the trip to the food market, instead this time he uses the word “MY” instead of “YOU”/”YOUR”. In the sentence,”About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way”(Wallace), suggests that he is trying to say that people worship themselves and that the audience should really try to reconsider other people’s perception of the same event. The issue is he experiences all of the things that he is trying to tell the audience they should really take into consideration and keep under wraps, but if someone is telling someone to do something that the first person really doesn’t do themself; it makes the first person a hypocrite. As said in the paragraph before, Wallace says it himself that he does not usually think with the open-mindedness that he keeps suggesting thinking with throughout his whole speech.

Through analyzing the repetition of words and the key concept of this piece one is able to see how much Wallace focuses on perception but doesn’t show his own tolerance of perception by forcing his ideas on the audience. Wallace’s overall message of perception and how different it can be for different people, almost makes his argument bias, since he is telling the audience that they must express tolerance to different perceptions of an event. If the audience were to actually look at the main concept of this piece, would they have actually listened to Wallace or taken him as a hypocrite because of his betrayal of his own words because he does not even follow them himself, no one will know.
