“This Is Water,” a film by The Glossary based on a commencement speech delivered by David Foster Wallace.
“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is - who and what is really important - if you want to operate under your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying or miserable.
But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know that you have 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 lit the stars - love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things.
Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. 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.”
