"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?'"
Setup
Commencement address at Kenyon College, May 21, 2005, by David Foster Wallace. Three and a half years later, Wallace died by suicide. The speech has since become, along with Jobs's Stanford address, the most-cited secular sermon in American life. Transcript via James Clear and the Kenyon bulletin.
The speech is deceptively simple: the most obvious, important realities are often the hardest to see. But underneath, DFW is arguing something hard: that a liberal-arts education's point is not knowledge or even thinking — it's attention. The ability to choose, moment by moment in adult life, what to pay attention to and how to construct meaning from it. Without that, you get the default setting, and the default setting eats you alive.
Pull quotes
"The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance."
The thesis. Note life or death. He means it.
"The really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about."
The redefinition. Thinking ≠ capacity. Thinking = choice of object.
"Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. … It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of."
The default setting. Same diagnosis as Saunders's three "confusions" — worth reading the two back to back.
"The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what 'day in day out' really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration."
What follows is the famous supermarket scene — the checkout line, the crazy-wheeled cart, the "Have a nice day" in the voice of death. The whole point of the speech pivots on this scene.
"The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop."
The hinge. The work isn't saved for big moments. It is done in the supermarket line.
"It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."
Read this knowing what happened in 2008. DFW knew exactly what he was describing.
"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. … If you worship money and things … you will never have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. … Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid. … Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."
The most-quoted passage. Worship is not opt-in; it's the operating mode. The question is what.
"The really important kind of freedom 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. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."
The alternative. Some infinite thing. Weighty.
"The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: 'This is water.' 'This is water.'"
The benediction.
What's doing the work
- The redefinition of "thinking." Like Deresiewicz (four years later at West Point), DFW is arguing that the point of a liberal arts education is not the capacity to think — you already have that. It's the choice of what to think about. That move relocates intellectual virtue from ability to attention.
- The supermarket is the test, not the library. The argument only works because DFW refuses to let the audience escape into abstraction. The entire speech pivots on whether you can be in a traffic jam and construct meaning other than these people are in my way. That's where the water is.
- Worship as ontological default. This is the move most people miss. DFW is not making a religious argument. He's saying there is no neutral stance. Your attention flows toward something, and whatever you give it to, runs you. The practical question is whether you picked it on purpose.
Threads
- The Inner Ring — C.S. Lewis at King's College (1944) — Lewis names one specific thing DFW's audience will worship by default: being inside. Read together, they become a field guide to default settings and their cures.
- Saunders's Failures of Kindness — George Saunders at Syracuse (2013) — the sister speech. Where DFW argues for awareness as the condition of freedom, Saunders argues for kindness as the use of that freedom. Same architecture, different emphasis.
- The Ceramic Cup Was Never Meant for Me — the cup story is a DFW default-setting moment: the general believes the cup is for him. The correction is exactly the supermarket reframe — notice what's actually happening.
- Untitled — DFW's Up, Simba is the companion piece on McCain and the 2000 campaign. Also cited on the McCain profile.
Source
Transcript: jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace. Original: Kenyon College bulletin. Later published as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (Little, Brown, 2009). Delivered May 21, 2005.