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As humans, our views tend to be enduring. Rarely do our opinions shift. But every now and then I'll stumble upon a piece that makes me take a step back and consider my outlook on everyday life.

It sounds dramatic, but then I read and watched David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College.  It was an assignment for a class, but as I listened, I was drawn to his words. His commencement speech is atypical; he pokes fun at the conventional format and clichés often brought up to a graduating class. He addresses the realities of life after college when you are suddenly thrust into the adult world.

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try and see it

Wallace, 2005

Wallace says it's easy to operate on a default setting. It's easy to live with the belief that the world is supposed to cater to your needs and to your feelings, and anything hindering your progression throughout your day is an inconvenience. If you really think about it, there aren't any experiences in your life where you weren't the absolute center of it. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you, but yours are immediate and real. This is our default setting, "hard-wired into our boards at birth." But it's rarely spoken about because it's considered so abhorrent in a social context.

He uses the example of having to go to the supermarket after work. You're tired after a long day but forget to get groceries earlier in the week, so you're standing in the check-out lane. And suddenly there's a lady screaming at her kid in front of you. Maybe you begin to feel impatient. In that situation, it's easy to automatically become annoyed or frustrated. Because they are taking up your time by making you stand in this line longer than you feel is necessary, so now you can't beat the evening traffic to go back to your home.

It requires little effort to take on this default setting - that you are the center of the world - when you are experiencing the mundane, frustrating, and boring parts of your adult life. But what Wallace emphasizes is you have no idea what people around you are experiencing in their lives. When you are aware enough, you can choose to look at these situations in a different light. Because maybe you are the one in their way. Maybe that lady is going through the worst imaginable experience in her life right now, and she's yelling at her kid right now because it's bubbling up and bursting into the moment right in front of you.

Our society promotes this mindset. Society pushes the idea of personal freedom, letting us, as Wallace puts it, "be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of creation." But real, true freedom means having enough consciousness and awareness to choose how you construct meaning in your experiences.

So what does it mean to break away from our default settings? Wallace admits that this is a difficult thing to do. There are days when you won't want to put in the effort and there are days when you just can't. Wallace speaks to his own experience, saying that an academic education actually enables his tendency to over-intellectualize, and get lost in the "abstract argument in [his] head." He misses what's going on right in front of him.

There are these two young fish swimming along and 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 looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?

Wallace, 2005

Wallace shares this anecdote in his speech to demonstrate what it means to diverge from the default. Living with knowledge means living with your eyes open, knowing what's right in front of you. It means reminding yourself of the true realities that exist around you and considering how your perception of the world isn't necessarily everyone's perception. It means to live with discipline, awareness, and attention. It's reminding yourself "this is water." And it's putting those ideas at the forefront of your daily consciousness.