This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

by David Foster Wallace

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down.

There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar college-graduate job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death.