DFW Commencement Speech

The commencement speech by David Foster Wallace is one where I truly feel like he had quite a bit on introspective knowledge to pass on to the graduate students of Kenyon College. It starts off with the quip of "what the hell is water?" which stuck out to me as quite a way to catch the attention of the students and he then went on to talk about the importance of how one views and copes with their daily life rituals. David brings up the notion of how we as people have a fairly centric view of reality, we never look for or bother to think about the people around us as much as we think about ourselves and how these people interact with us. I feel like this is a very key point and probably my big takeaway from the article as possibly the most effective way to really coping with many of our problems is to take a grander view of the world rather than the largely centric view we tend to take. We can of course always concentrate on how awful our lives are and how annoying the people around us are with their slow moving cars or annoying and loud behaviors but if we can actually take a moment and consider that they as other people have their own situations happening simultaneously as ours it can do a lot to take away this narcissistic mindset. By taking away this mindset I believe we can then do a lot to curb our behavior and become better with coping with our daily grind since then we will not only think of "why are these people always getting in my way" but more in the sense that "these people may be in my way at the moment but they probably have their own situations going on as well" which helps as we become much less central minded and are less likely to become upset when things do not go our way. This change in thinking I think is something that we should do but don't do enough on a daily basis and I thought it was nice that David Foster Wallace brought it to the attention as it really is possibly the most important thing if one plans to survive the daily grind of real life. One can not plan to survive in this world if one only thinks about themselves and becomes ignorant to the idea that the people around us also have their own goals and needs.