Being "well-adjusted"

Satur­day, October 11, 2008

Of course there are all different kinds of free­dom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achiev­ing… The really impor­tant kind of freedom involves atten­tion and aware­ness and disci­pline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacri­fice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

- David Foster Wallace, in a 2005 commence­ment speech at Kenyon College.

Please read this speech if you haven’t already. I can’t admit to having read much of Wallace’s work before his death, but I have been profoundly moved by his words. In a talk that must have lasted less than 30 minutes, Wallace hit upon some­thing that I have been trying to artic­u­late, in one way or another, for many years.

There are two funda­men­tally different modes of living. Wallace describes the first, perhaps more common, mode as the “de­fault setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth,” which is “to be deeply and liter­ally self­-­cen­tered and to see and inter­pret every­thing through this lens of self­.” Its oppo­site is a constant internal struggle towards self­-aware­ness and empa­thy, part of which involves being some­times painfully aware of how often one falls short of that goal.

I believe this divide explains many modern phenom­ena: why driving sucks, for exam­ple, or much polit­ical rhetoric this season.

---

blog comments powered by Disqus