David Foster Wallace delivered a graduation speech called “This Is Water” many years ago and it is one of the best speeches I have read. He talks about how everyday adult life can quite easily fall into a structured, repetitive & bitter routine.
How we can slip into a crevice of agitation, how our thinking can be poisoned by our experiences and observations, how counterintuitive it is to fall into a default setting.
He mentions that the most powerful reward of education is the freedom to think, adjust perspectives, and construct meaning from experiences. That these are more powerful than the capacity to think, which we traditionally have assumed.
It is a major component that is often overlooked. Throughout our everyday mundane tasks such as commuting to work, cooking food, showering, etc, we have the power to control what our mind is thinking about. Often during these repetitive tasks where our valuable time is consumed, we are ranting to ourselves in our minds. We tend to only think about ourselves and how everyone and everything is getting in the way of our time. We are essentially wasting our own finite mental energy pondering thoughts that contribute no value. In fact, I bet the complaints people think about during mundane everyday tasks are the same complaints many other people also experience.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out
David argued that the real value of education is not the capacity to think, but rather the freedom to think about whatever pleases you. It might seem like a useless truism but I reassure you, the more you ponder what it means to have this freedom and its implications, the more you will understand.
David goes on to describe an example of a mundane everyday task typical of an adult life which involves a short-story about commuting home from work with slow traffic in a poor conditioned car and also stopping by a crowded grocery store with long lines. He makes sure to describe what hypothetically a person would be thinking about throughout this entire scenario to help illustrate the point that we are all victims of this behavior.
He mentions that many people think in this manner and that often it seems almost, automatic. Like a default setting that we reset to.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m 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.
Empathy, David mentions that the simple thought of empathy goes a long way in these situations. To stop for a second, and ask yourself “Why am I angry at this driver on the road?” There are people in drastically different situations all around you, to take a second to stop and think about it will shift you out of your default setting.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying 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’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
To follow up:
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
The final touch:
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and 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 all to be lords of our 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 kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
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.
There you have it, one of the most interesting elements of mundane everyday things is the freedom to think, imagine, and wander in your mind. In fact, it’s more than interesting, it’s part of your character and influences your physical and mental health.
If there is anything to take-away from mundane tasks, it is to not let your default setting be in control too often. Stop jumping to typical judgments of distaste, instead, take the time to find peace in your mind, to realize that many of the people in the same mundane situations are more or less similar to you in regards to their feelings and thoughts about their surroundings.
