What The Hell Is Water?

David Foster Wallace's speech “This Is Water” seeks to remind us of the complex simplicity of our daily lives. While it rarely crosses our minds it surely is a strange feeling to think “This is Life, I am… living.” Young adults especially seem to lack an inherent sense of reality and purpose in our daily lives. Texting, tweeting, and snap chatting have been elevated as actions chiefly more important than studying, learning, or educating. Popularity outweighs good grades and parties outweigh study groups. The relationships we have with others disregard personal interests or values, but are becoming more and more founded on the mere notion of where you were last Friday night. These inferior beliefs that are held so dear encourage an increased focus on what we think about people and things instead of us trying to discover the truth behind people and things for ourselves. Unfortunately we get trapped in this exaggerated version of what Wallace calls our natural default setting. He tells us that this is where the act of choosing comes into play. Yes, we can choose to continue to live life this way and get unnecessarily angry when our Instagram photo gets sub-100 likes or we have to wait over 15 minutes for a return text message. But at the end of the day this only contributes to the boredom and repetitiveness of our self-inflicted monotonous lives.  To break out of this vicious cycle of social dependency we need to learn to accept the wisdom and advice of others. When our teachers bravely stand up in front of a group of several judgmental teenagers give them so credit. They are clearly passionate about what they are doing and deserve our attention and respect. And by giving this attention and respect we might actually learn to appreciate what they do for us and benefit from their knowledge. Because remember, they are only trying to help us. Taking this new found knowledge and understanding we can approach our lives in a significantly different light. Our social media no longer dictates how we feel. Keeping this in mind it makes it easier to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. When that annoying soccer mom in the old minivan cuts you off on the highway tomorrow instead of honking your horn and riding her bumper for the next five miles try and remember the last time you were in a hurry or lost on the way to a friend’s house and had to quickly merge into the left hand lane. Remember when the car behind you didn’t beep or tailgate you but let you in without a complaint. That person in the car behind you put themselves in your shoes and chose to understand your situation without even knowing you. Like Wallace says in his speech, “It’s not likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends on what you want to consider.” So next time, instead of operating on your natural default setting, see things from someone else’s perspective because you never known what someone is going through.