This is Water: David Foster Wallace on the Choice of Awareness

David Foster Wallace opened his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech with a parable. Two young fish are swimming along when they pass an older fish headed the other way. The older fish nods and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one turns to the other and asks, 'What the hell is water?' Wallace told the audience he was not the wise old fish. The parable was not about knowledge or seniority. It was about the peculiar blindness that comes from total immersion — the way the most obvious, important realities are often the hardest to see precisely because they surround us completely. We do not notice the medium we inhabit. Fish presumably do not perceive water as a distinct substance because they have never experienced its absence. Wallace argued that human beings have their own version of water: the automatic, unconscious patterns of thought that structure every waking moment. These patterns feel like reality itself rather than one possible interpretation of reality. Recognising them as patterns — as water, not the world — is the first and most difficult step toward any kind of genuine freedom.

Wallace argued that every person's natural default setting is to experience themselves as the absolute centre of the universe. This is not a moral failing. It is the basic architecture of consciousness. You have never experienced a moment when you were not the protagonist of your own story. The traffic jam exists, in your default narrative, to inconvenience you personally. The slow grocery store checkout line is a conspiracy against your schedule. The colleague who cut you off in conversation did it because they do not respect you. Wallace understood that this default is not selfishness in the ordinary sense — it is the automatic, unconscious way human perception works before any deliberate thought intervenes. Left on autopilot, the mind generates a running commentary in which you are the only real person and everyone else is an obstacle, an extra, or an instrument for your purposes. William James anticipated this insight when he wrote that the deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated. What Wallace added was the observation that this craving, running unchecked, produces a kind of quiet imprisonment — a life lived entirely inside your own head, sealed off from the actual experiences of the people around you.

The speech's central argument is that the real value of a liberal arts education is not knowledge, not critical thinking skills, not career preparation. It is something far simpler and far harder: the ability to exercise conscious choice over what you pay attention to and how you construct meaning from experience. Wallace offered a concrete example. You are in the supermarket checkout line after a long day. The fluorescent lights are harsh. The line is not moving. The person ahead of you is counting out change with agonising slowness. Your default setting produces irritation, self-pity, and a narrative about how everyone else is in your way. But Wallace proposed an alternative. You can choose to consider that the slow person ahead of you might be genuinely suffering — might have spent the previous night at a hospital bedside, might be dealing with grief or chronic pain or burdens so heavy that counting change takes all the concentration they have left. Wallace was not prescribing naive optimism or forcing yourself to see the bright side. He was describing a discipline — the conscious, moment-to-moment decision to construct a narrative that is at least as plausible as your default one, and considerably less toxic to inhabit.

Wallace delivered this speech in 2005, before the smartphone became the dominant mediator of human attention. His argument about the choice of awareness has only grown more urgent since. William James wrote in 1890 that 'my experience is what I agree to attend to' — a sentence that compresses an entire philosophy of mind into eleven words. What you attend to is not a supplement to your experience. It is your experience. There is nothing else. Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate in economics, made a related prediction in 1971. He argued that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and that the scarce resource of the future would not be information but the ability to allocate attention wisely. Both predictions have proved almost comically accurate. The person who spends two hours scrolling outrage feeds and the person who spends two hours in deep conversation with someone they love are not having different days. They are inhabiting different realities, constructed by different attention choices. Wallace's insight was that most people treat attention as something that happens to them — you notice what is interesting, you react to what is stimulating. He argued that attention is something you do, and that doing it well requires the kind of effort most people reserve for physical labour.

It would be easy to reduce Wallace's argument to a self-help platitude: think positive thoughts and your problems disappear. That misreading strips the speech of everything that makes it valuable. Wallace was not arguing that you should suppress negative emotions or manufacture gratitude on command. He was arguing something far more uncomfortable — that your default interpretation of reality is a construction, not a fact, and that you bear a responsibility to notice the construction happening. This is closer to cognitive behavioural therapy than to positive thinking. Aaron Beck, the founder of CBT, built an entire therapeutic framework around the observation that automatic thoughts are not accurate reflections of reality but habitual patterns that can be examined and revised. Wallace would likely have resisted the comparison — he was suspicious of neat systems — but the structural similarity is striking. The discipline Wallace described is also not effortless. He was explicit about this. He called it 'the work of choosing' and warned that it requires the kind of sustained attention that goes against every comfortable impulse. The speech carries a dark undertone that many readers have noted in retrospect. Wallace knew how difficult this discipline was to maintain, and that the choice to override the default must be made again and again, in every frustrating moment, for an entire lifetime.

Wallace's speech is not about big decisions, career strategy, or peak experiences. It is about the banal, unglamorous, repetitive texture of adult life — commuting, shopping, waiting in line, being tired, running errands, sitting in traffic. His argument is that these moments, which collectively make up the vast majority of your waking hours, are exactly where the choice of awareness matters most. You will spend far more of your life in supermarket checkout lines than in moments of professional triumph. The quality of those ordinary hours is determined not by external circumstances but by the quality of attention you bring to them. You cannot control traffic or slow checkout lines or the weather or other people's behaviour. You can control the story you tell yourself about all of these things. That choice, repeated thousands of times across the weeks and months and years, is the difference between what Thoreau called lives of quiet desperation and lives of genuine presence and engagement. Wallace understood that this sounds like a small insight — even a banal one. That was precisely his point. The fish do not notice the water because the water is everywhere and always has been. The most important truths about how to live are the ones hiding in plain sight, in the ordinary moments everyone rushes to get through on their way to something they consider more significant.