This Is Water: Re-imagining Everyday Life

O, the maddening tedium of the everyday responsibilities of adult life!

It plagues us because, when traversing a landscape all-too-familiar and all-too-disappointing, the "default setting" of our mentality is to feel victimized by circumstance. We place ourselves in the center of the universal narrative, making the plot-line all about our own misery.

In this video, which animates exceprts of his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon University, novelist David Foster Wallace speaks about personal empowerment in the often stultifying world of responsible adulthood. The freedom comes from an open-minded awareness of the possibility that there are less self-centered, complex, and gladdening narratives spinning around you -- even in the most frustrating situations. "It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down," he advises. "Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it."