- David Foster Wallace had one goal in mind with his commencement speech in 2005, and that was to convey to the graduates that the most important thing they have to understand when they graduate isn’t their future jobs, or relationships, but instead their own minds. He didn’t want to give them the conventional didactic story that every speaker gives with the hope that you are listening to them and not the internal monologue in your head. He made me think about how I perceive life and if I do it in a selfish way or not. Do I think about how others are feeling before I feel bad for myself? Do my beliefs shape my actions and decisions? Wallace made me realize that my mind works in such ways that sometimes you just must try and click reset in order to be aware of the lives around me. The key takeaways I had from his speech were that bases on our beliefs the exact same experience can mean two different things to people, our minds are set to a natural default setting of self-centeredness, and worship will cause us to act in certain ways. “Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are all really about me” (Wallace 4). In this section of the speech Wallace talks about how adult’s everyday tasks such as having a long day of work, sitting in miserably and intense traffic on the highway, and the dreadful shop through the supermarket along with half the town in each checkout line. We spend so much time focusing on the small things that make our lives difficult that we overlook that others may be going through the same things if not worse. It is up to me to be able to home in my internal selfishness and be aware of others.
As for our worship shaping our minds, it relates to his other main point of two different meanings to the same experience. “A person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow hard-wired” (Wallace 2). Our beliefs and ideals are believed to be something we are born with or develop early on in our life because we are raised and taught that way. We experience it to be one way for so long we know nothing different. Worshiping is one of the main things our orientation is molded to. When we worship, we are left with the feeling, “you will never have enough, never feel you have enough” (Wallace 5). So often we get so caught up with our beliefs that we try and convince people that our way is the only acceptable way and when they say no we should immediately disown them. Then we feel a wave of unfulfillment as we didn’t get what we wanted so we keep hunting for someone to believe in something the way we do. Now we are circled back to the default setting of our brains. The idea that everything must follow what I want, it’s about how I feel, nothing is okay unless I say so. That is how we are wired, and it is up to us to change it.
2. I agree with David Foster Wallace’s main arguments because I feel as if he makes the reader realize what our minds are telling us on a daily. So often than not we fail to realize that we base our perception of the world around ourselves as individuals. Our experiences, beliefs, morals, friendships, these factors all influence how we view the world. But our main view is ourselves. Every experience is taken with an “I” or “me” response. Many times, I catch myself constantly saying “I” or trying to make things about me when the situation at hand has nothing to do with me. I am running of that default setting wired into my brain and no matter how hard I work to rewire it, it somehow always reverts to the original setting. It was enlightening to see a logical perspective on how I feel on a reoccurring basis and knowing that it is justified as a way that all brains are wired and not just my own. I also would agree on his worship ideas as I have experienced times where people close to me tried making me go against my own beliefs to follow their own and then being ignored because I didn’t give them that satisfaction of having enough. It isn’t something that is enjoyable, but it is a circumstance of relationships that is good to be brought to light.
3. I don’t believe that David Foster Wallace is referring to empathy more as he is referring more to compassion. He wants the readers to realize that there are other people that are going through the same things as us if not worse. We don’t necessarily have to rewire our brains to prioritize others and their feelings, but instead just think about the things they may be going through. Now as an example, in reference to a mother, “maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer” (Wallace 5). Now maybe this isn’t the conclusion we should jump to every time we want to show compassion towards someone, but it is a start in the right direction. The person sitting in front of you in line in traffic could be needed to get somewhere just as dire as you are. We shouldn’t let out brain wiring cloud our judgement towards other people. Wallace wants us to feel a sense of compassion of sympathy towards a person rather than feel empathy or regret for someone. Empathy is more of feeling for someone going through a known situation, whereas Wallace was trying to convey the openness to imagining the life that they are living alongside you and try to sympathize with the unknown.
4. A quote from DFW that evoked a strong response from me was, “It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to” (Wallace 5). This quote really sparked something in me because I can relate to it. We are told that we are too selfish and then when we try to be compassionate or show empathy towards people it can be overbearing. It is ok for us to do both, but we must find a happy medium between the two and that is hard to do with little practice. Some days it is easier to sympathize for people and other days we find it complicated to sympathize with ourselves let alone another person. On days where I feel like I am the worst person in the world because I can’t complete a simple task or something I wanted to go right went wrong, I’m going to find it difficult to not sympathize with myself and support others when they need me. It has taken time and practice where I am able to suppress my emotions to prioritize people in my life who may need it more. Strangers on the other hand is still hard as you don’t have a connection to them so why would you choose to empathize or show compassion towards them if they have no effect on your current state of mind. It is the complicated inter-wiring of the brain that we must understand and develop for ourselves.
5. DFW’s main points interact with Paul Bloom’s ideas by showing sympathy towards others in situations. DFW focuses more on compassion and how we should focus on the unknown factors that could be contributing to a person’s sadness of off-putting behaviors. Whereas Paul Bloom decides to focus on the empathizing with the known behaviors or situations of a stranger. They have similar points however when they connect to us potentially being overbearing in some cases. Where we could worship our ideals so hard that we force them onto others so intensely that it can corrupt the relationship you have worked towards. This goes hand and hand with being too empathetic to the point where you are trying so hard to help someone that they end up just ignoring you or pushing you away. These topics are so similar yet vastly different as they have similarities, but their main focuses differ. DFW’s speech was mainly written around the way our brains are wired to a natural default setting of self-centeredness and Paul Bloom’s is how our biases and beliefs can cloud our moral judgement.
Be the first to reply