Wallace's Commencement Address

When David Foster Wallace gave the commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005, he started off with:

“Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is...to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff...most pervasive cliché...is about “teaching you how to think.””

He then points out how that cliché is received by most normal students:

“You tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think.”

So true. That is why Wallace goes on to explain what the saying really means:

“The really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get…(is) about the choice of what to think about.”

Because that choice translates into something very important:

“It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

Philosophy aside, that choice has practical uses too!

“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.”

Wallace has this to say about many of our un-thought out beliefs:

“It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.”

That is why breaking out of such beliefs requires conscious effort:

“It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting.”

He warns about falling in love with power, money, intellect or careers:

“The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.”

Left unquestioned, it leads to:

“An imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.”

Given the choice of words and examples in his speech, it was quite easy to misinterpret him to be talking (only) morality or virtue. That is why he explicitly states at the end:

“None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.”