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

by David Foster Wallace

The exact same experience can mean two completely different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.

As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice, of conscious decision.

the fact is that religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s atheist’s — arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that’s like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

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.

It’s the automatic, unconscious 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 center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

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.