Disclaimer: The following is a response to Kenyon Commencement Speech by David Foster Wallace. It is constructed upon my own personal reaction to the address. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Blink. Breathe. Think.
You are now conscious of the things you take most for granted; you are now conscious of the habits you usually do not pay attention to. You are blinking. You are breathing.
You are thinking.
Being selfish, I’ve noticed, is one of the most inherently human things you can be, yet as a society, we ridicule and slander and shame selfishness because in a world of seven billion beating hearts, to only care about one is deemed vile, repulsive, a trait from which you can never recover. What we fail to realise is that you really can’t recover from selfishness, because there is nothing more natural than it. Think about it: your own interests are your primary concern because they’re right there all the time. They’re immediate; the interests of others are not. The interests of others have to be communicated to you, brought to your attention, so it’s easy to just forget about and ignore them. There’s not a lot we can do about this. It’s our natural, default setting.
But it doesn’t have to be.
When my Year 12 English teacher handed me a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Speech and told me to give it a go, I had no idea I was about to read the piece of writing that would fundamentally change the very essence of the person I was. An address at Kenyon College in 2005, the Kenyon Commencement Speech (adapted into a book, This Is Water, in 2009) discusses a myriad of ubiquitous and important truths of human nature, but the one I want to reflect on here -- the one that struck a chord with me so pure that I still feel it reverberating somewhere in my chest -- is the fact that we have a choice: to live, or to live consciously. To only live is to succumb to our natural, default setting. That’s fine. A lot of people choose only to live -- although given that it is our natural, default setting, one can hardly call it a choice. To live consciously, then, is to escape our hard-wiring. It is to overcome the passivity of our unconscious consumption of the world; it is, as Wallace puts it, to acknowledge that it can 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”. By living consciously, you are choosing when and where to extract meaning and significance from the mundane. You are choosing what to see. You are choosing what to value.
You are choosing what to think.
Yes: being selfish is one of the most inherently human things you can be. It’s completely normal to look at a situation and see only how it affects you, bothers you, changes you. To quote Wallace, “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most important person in existence”. Living consciously means looking at the same situation and choosing to realise that you are not the only person in it. I’ll give you some some examples. Let’s say you, like me, are an impatient driver, and one day you’re late for work and your knuckles are turning white as they grip the steering wheel and you’re grinding your teeth in frustration because the idiot in front of you is doing 30 in a 50km zone and if you’re late to work because this moron doesn’t seem to know what a speed limit is then with God as your witness, you swear, you’ll rear-end him just to teach him a lesson. You could choose to look at this situation and see only the cause of your own inconvenience. I mean, 30 in a 50km zone? Seriously? You could, however, choose to step back and look at the moment differently. Why is the car in front driving so slowly? (And I promise you, it’s not because he has a personal vendetta against you specifically, even though it probably feels like he does.) Sure, maybe he’s just an asshole. Maybe, however, he has something fragile perched precariously on the back seat and he’s driving glacially slow so as not to break it. Maybe his kid is lying across the back seat, but his kid has just broken their leg and he’s rushing them to the hospital as fast as he dares, not wanting to jolt the poor kid’s broken leg. Maybe this guy just has anxiety so bad that he’d rather not leave the house at all, but he has to go to work because how’s he going to pay the rent without working, so 30km/h is the fastest he can will himself to drive. Maybe he’s recovering from neurotic agoraphobia. Who knows? You don’t. Here’s another example: I had a bad experience at work once, when a woman, whose patience I dared test by asking her to wait for me to finish what I was doing, verbally abused me, attacking my competence and adequacy because I lacked the capacity to be in two places at once. As a customer service worker, it’s not uncommon for me to be ruthlessly degraded when I make the smallest of mistakes. People tend to treat customer service workers…. poorly, to say the least, because you never spend enough time around them to develop the realisation that actually, they’re a human being, just like you! Having read the Kenyon Commencement Speech, I’ve since been acutely aware of how a person’s indifference to or ignorance of conscious living affects my day-to-day life. For a long time, I considered myself a victim of the general public because they fail to be conscious of other people's’ lives. Only now does it occur to me that I’m also guilty of doing the exact same thing. That woman who yelled at me on the drive-thru; is she always that mean, or had she just had a bad day? Was she in a hurry to be somewhere? Maybe she was just a stupid cow -- or maybe she was picking up lunch for her son, whose chemotherapy session was beginning in half an hour. None of these scenarios, picked from a crop of a million possibilities, are likely, but none of them are impossible, either. You just have to choose to consider them.
Of course, we always have “freedom of choice regarding what to think about”, and with this freedom, you could choose to ignore the endless explanations, give in to your default setting, consume the world as if your “immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities”. Wallace and I, however, implore you not to choose this. I’ve come to believe, since reading the Kenyon Commencement Speech, that humans are made out of moments. Now, I was a chemistry student in high school, so I do know the science: our bodies and hearts and minds are made up of atoms and ions and stardust, but I think our souls -- for I do rather believe in that namby-pamby nonsense -- are composed of moments, tiny snapshots captured at random, seemingly insignificant seconds, and that these shape who we really are. I have also come to believe that these moments can only have meaning if we choose to construct that meaning ourselves. This is the second time I’ve reviewed and reflected on David Foster Wallace’s words, because two years after reading them, I still think about those words nearly every day. They changed me. They taught me the most important lesson I have ever learned: we must escape self-centeredness, we must break free from the human condition of selfishness and solipsism, and we must learn to consider and be conscious of other people’s lives having the same importance as our own, even though it’s hard, even though it’s easier to just forget that other human beings exist in the same cognitive capacity as you. If we don’t utilise our power to choose, we are choosing not to think. So think. Blink, breathe, think.
And make your choice.
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