ThisIsWater
This is Water (David Foster Wallace)
- Powerful. Quick read.
- The immediate point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are ofter the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
- In the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.
- The really sigificant ediucation in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isnt really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
- "Teaching me how to think" is really supposed to mean to be just a little less arrogant, to have some "critical awareness" about myself and my certainties … because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
- Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables a tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going in front of me. Instead of paying attention to whats going on inside of me.
It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue instide your head.
What you dont yet know are the stakes in this struggle.
"Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how ant what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose waht you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life you will be totoally hosed.
- How to keep from going through you confortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to you head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially along, day in and day out.
- The traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think and if I dont make a conscious decision about how to think and about what to pay attention to, Im going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is that situation like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and its going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way and who the fuck are all these people in my way?
- The automatic unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating crowded parts of adult life what Im 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 worlds priorities.
- If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important – if you want to operate on your default setting – then you, like me, proabbly will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.
The only think that is capital-T True is that you get to decide how youre toing to try to see it.
This is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.
Everybody worships, the only choice we get is what to worship.
- On one level we all know this already – its been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, parables: the skeleton of every great story.
- The trick is keeping the truth up frong in daily consciousness.
- The "real world" will not discourage you from operating on you default settings, because the "real world" of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving the worshop of self.
- The really important kind of freedom involved 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.
- This is about life before death.