Wallace thought the way to fight all this was to focus your individual attention—through a sort of iron willpower. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” Wallace told Kenyon College graduates in his famous commencement address. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
