TB: This is Water (David Foster Wallace)
Core Thesis
The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the hardest to see. The real purpose of education is not the capacity to think but the choice of what to think about — learning to exercise control over how and what you pay attention to, so that you are not a slave to your default setting of self-as-center-of-the-world. This is life before death.
Key Takeaways
The default setting
- The automatic, unconscious experience of adult life operates on the belief that "I am the center of the world and my immediate needs should determine the world's priorities."
- If you cannot exercise choice over how you construct meaning from experience, you will be "totally hosed" in adult life — not by external events but by your own unconscious.
- The real world does not discourage this default; it runs quite nicely on fuel of fear, contempt, frustration, and worship of self.
Education as attention, not capacity
- The significant education in thinking is not about increasing the capacity to think, but about the choice of what to think about.
- Teaching someone to think really means: be a little less arrogant, have critical awareness about yourself and your certainties — because a huge percentage of what we are automatically certain of is totally wrong.
- The most dangerous thing about academic education is that it enables a tendency to over-intellectualize instead of simply paying attention to what is actually going on.
The freedom of conscious attention
- The only thing that is capital-T True is that you get to decide how you try to see a given situation.
- You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.
- The really important kind of freedom involves attention, awareness, discipline, effort — and being able truly to care about other people and sacrifice for them, over and over, in petty and unsexy ways, every day.
Worship is unavoidable
- In the day-to-day trenches, there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships; the only choice is what to worship.
- It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head.
Mental Models
- Take the Other Person's Point of View — Wallace's central argument is that conscious attention defeats the default self-centered frame