## Metadata - Author: [[David Foster Wallace]] - Full Title:: This Is Water - Category:: #🗞️Articles - Document Tags:: [[¡qué alegría de vivir!]], [[¡Qué alegría de vivir!]], - URL:: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/10937018 - Read date:: [[2026-09-24]] ## Highlights La [[Misanthropy]]: sentirse en el centro del universo (que no eres, me ha recordado a [[Cosmic insignificance therapy]]) y frustrarse por las dificultades y lo mundano. Pero puedes elegir ver las cosas de otra manera e incluso buscar meaning aquí. Lo malo es que hay que recordárselo: This is water. > Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self- centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39pdwvbdkgh149knenvp111)) > This is not a matter of virtue — it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39pfamq20mr9a80800pzg1b)) > There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39qzws4z1xf5p345j48wzqq)) > everybody else is just in my way, > and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these > stupid god-damn people. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39rsgqge8s58menymp5r60k)) > Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth... ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39r5v6ay3y0v3yqp24b6v5n)) > if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39rwaczk10xsj99z1td4b45)) > The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship... ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39ra8p48dtf8rk2k1273ftc)) > They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39rcj8jc9kpw5sgahxw4y6m)) > The really important kind of > freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. > I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39rdx6b2jmpr3amnm81zzze)) > None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.” > It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m39rekaa3hg0hjj47mhrg9ac)) > How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keanyap796xrgq6nxx3bv61m)) > And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid god-damn people. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keap29tbh86tyyzzcgrzq5bz)) > Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keap4krty8zmzhttpv9me1yd)) > It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as > not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keap6bzh35bg0e5g4ah7e6ze)) > In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keapdcd9htreg1bdq0ya4fb8)) > the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keape56kft6dt6tfkgykh76a)) > It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keapfwthw2dm46fez6wcvymt)) > It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01keapg1jns17kp3bkdzq1741w))