I spent two whole days last week going through commencement speeches because I was doing a story on them. What struck me the most was how most speakers play to the gallery. They say what they think will impress the graduates and, as a result, most of the takeaways are similar: Don’t be afraid of failure, follow your passion, dream big, and so on.
A commencement speech that was significantly different from the others was that of author David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. Titled ‘This is water’, the speech had strong philosophical underpinnings and a pleasing unselfconsciousness. Since then, it has entered the annals of legendary commencement speeches, produced and re-produced by each batch of American graduates. What lent it added poignancy was the fact that Wallace committed suicide just three years after he gave the speech. It was, therefore, one of the final glimpses one got into his mind before he took the extreme step.
In his speech, Wallace displayed profound insight into human nature. Like how we are blind to the most obvious things staring us in the face. He gave a small anecdote to illustrate this. Two young fish are swimming along when they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them turns to the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” We are all living and functioning in the metaphorical water of the fish, but are we aware of it?
This was Wallace’s basic message: to live life consciously. Because, as humans, our minds are programmed to a “default setting”. For example, each of us believes that we are the absolute centre of the universe. “The world as you experience it is there in front of you, or behind you, or to the left or right of you, or your TV or your monitor,” said Wallace. “Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.” That is why it is so important to consciously adjust your default setting, to turn your life ‘other-ward’ instead of ‘self-ward’.
There is another way in which we function according to our default setting—when we let our natural instincts select our idols for us. Because there is no such thing as an atheist, says Wallace. Everyone worships something. The only choice we get is what to worship. And unless we act consciously, our default setting is always programmed to lead us the wrong way. To go after money, fame, beauty or power. If you worship money, you will never have enough, says Wallace. If you worship your body, beauty and sexual allure, you will always feel ugly. And if you worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need even more power over others to numb you to your own fear. “The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious,” he says. “They are default settings.”
Of course, these idols do yield short-term returns, as is evident in the US, where Wallace was from. They have produced extraordinary wealth, comfort and personal freedom. But they cannot give you the only kind of freedom that matters: “the freedom that involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty, unsexy ways every day,” he says. The alternative, according to him, is the default setting—the rat race, “the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing”.
So why did someone so wise, who seemed to know so much about ultimate reality, take his own life? Part of it probably had to do with his clinical depression. When he discontinued the antidepressant drug he was on, it led to unbearable distress and, eventually, death. But I respectfully posit that his depression was not the whole story. According to his Amherst College classmate and author Mark Costello, Wallace felt an immense burden to surpass the success of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Because of this, he suffered from bouts of self-abasement and severe insecurity. In other words, no matter how much Wallace detected his own default setting, he was powerless to reset it. He could not bend his own mind outwards instead of inwards.
But before we point any fingers, let’s take a good, hard look at ourselves. Can we truly claim to have escaped the default setting of our minds? To have unshackled ourselves from ourselves? To genuinely care for others outside our immediate circle of friends and family? What Wallace said—about worshipping the wrong things, of considering ourselves to be the centre of the universe, of missing the obvious things that are right in front of us—is as relevant today as it was then. He saw a truth that most of us are blind to: that we are all living inside a cage. He just didn’t know how to get out of it.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
