“This is Water” Habit Speech By David Foster Wallace

In this article, you will find David Foster Wallace’s famous speech “This Is Water”.

I stumbled over the speech below by David Foster Wallace¹ while I did some research for my upcoming book “The Behaviour Architect“.

Speech Transcript

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?”

If, at this moment, you are worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please do not be. I am not a wise old fish. The primary point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, and important realities are often the ones that are the 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 life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole or abstract nonsense. So, let us get concrete…

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here is one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the most real, most vivid and important person in existence.

We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it is so socially repulsive. However, it is pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you have had that you were not at the absolute centre of.

The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your T.V., or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow. However, your own feelings are so immediate, urgent, real – you get the idea. But please do not worry that I am getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues”. This is not a matter of virtue – it is a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

By way of example, let us say it is an average day. You get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours. At the end of the day, you are tired, and you are stressed out. All you want to do is go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours, and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there is no food at home – you have not had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job – and so now after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It is the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should. When you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course, it is the time of day when all of the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. The store’s hideously, fluorescently lit and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop. It is pretty much the last place you want to be, but you cannot just get in and out quickly.

You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all of these other tired, hurried people with carts. Of course, there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle. You have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by. Eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there are not enough checkout lanes open even though it is the end-of-the-day rush. Hence, the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. However, you cannot take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything does not fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home. Then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I do not make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I am going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food shop because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like these are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue, and my desire just to get home. It is going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid. Cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I have worked really hard all day, and I am starved and tired, and I cannot even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

Or, of course, if I am in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all of the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas. I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam. I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all of the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do – except that, thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic, it does not have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It is the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I am operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is, is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It is not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he is trying to rush to the hospital, and he is in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am – it is actually I who is in his way. And so on.

Again, please do not think that I am giving you moral advice, or that I am saying you are “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you just automatically to do it; because it is hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you are like me, some days you will not be able to do it, or you just flat-out will not want to. But most days, if you are aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line – maybe she is not usually like this; perhaps she has been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who is dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is a low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department. The latter just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it is also not impossible – it just depends on what you want to consider. Suppose you are automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important – if you want to operate on your default-setting – then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that are not pointless and annoying. But if you have really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true: The only thing that is, is the capital T in “True”, and that you get to decide how you are going to try to see it. You get to decide what has meaning and what does not consciously. You get to decide what to worship…

Because here is something else that is true. 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. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then, you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It is the truth.

Worship your own body, beauty, and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. When time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it has been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, and parables: The skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up – upfront in your daily consciousness. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need even more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, and always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They are 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 is what you are doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course, there are all different kinds of freedom and the most precious kind you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, awareness, discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in a myriad of petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably does not sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, as far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please do not dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital T in Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness – awareness of what is so real and essential, hidden in plain sight all around us, so that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water”.

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: Your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Footnotes

1. The speech was originally published on the Kenyon College website.