David Foster Wallace and the Water You Can't See

David Foster Wallace opened a commencement speech with a parable he didn’t write and didn’t claim to: two young fish swimming along meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, and eventually one of them looks at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

The joke is on the fish, but it’s not really about fish. It’s about the stuff so close to your face that you stop being able to see it — your own default settings. The story you automatically tell yourself about why the line is moving slowly, why that driver cut you off, why the day is going badly. Wallace’s point was that this default setting is not a character flaw. It’s just what the brain does when nobody’s paying attention to it.

“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think — it means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to.

This is not the same as positive thinking, and Wallace was allergic to anything that sounded like a self-help slogan. He wasn’t saying choose the happy interpretation. He was saying you actually have a choice about which interpretation gets to run the show — and most of the time you don’t exercise it, because exercising it is tiring and the default is free.

The water doesn’t go away once you notice it. That’s the part people get wrong when they retell this story as inspiration. You don’t graduate out of the grocery store line, the bad traffic, the slow Wi-Fi. You just stop mistaking the water for the whole ocean. Some days you’ll forget again and swim straight through it without a thought — that’s not failure, that’s just being a fish. The only different thing is that now and then, something taps you on the shoulder and you remember to ask the question.