David Foster Wallace · This Is Water
May 21, 2005, Gambier, Ohio. Kenyon College's commencement. On the platform stands a forty-three-year-old novelist in his trademark bandanna. Two-thirds of the way through, he is working himself up about rush-hour traffic — the enormous, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers burning their "wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas," and how the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest—
The crowd bursts into applause.
He stops, mid-word: "this is an example of how NOT to think, though" — and then says the interrupted sentence over again, from the top.
That moment explains the whole speech. He was never criticizing SUV drivers. He was demonstrating how his own default programming runs — and the applause proved the audience's default programming was running in exactly the same way, while they congratulated themselves on being on the right side of it.
The speech opens with a joke. Two young fish are swimming along; an older fish passing the other way nods and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" The young fish swim on a while, and then one looks at the other: "What the hell is water?" Wallace immediately dismantles his own pedestal: "I am not the wise old fish." The story means only one thing — the most obvious, important realities are the hardest ones to see and talk about.
The reality he wants to make visible is this: you are wired to experience yourself as the center of the universe. That is not a moral failing, it is a factory setting — "It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth." He refuses to preach compassion. Instead he gets very concrete: the commute, the crowded supermarket, the checkout line that is too long. If you don't consciously decide how to think, you will automatically experience all of it as a personal affront, and everyone around you as stupid, cow-like and dead-eyed.
The tired cliché that a liberal arts education is about "teaching you how to think," he argues, actually means something specific: learning to exercise some control over what you think about. Because the same checkout line permits another reading — maybe the woman screaming at her kid has been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband dying of bone cancer. Not likely, but not impossible. "The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it."
Then the turn that gives the speech its spine: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life there is no such thing as atheism, and no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships; the only choice is what. Worship money and you will never feel you have enough. Worship your body and you will always feel ugly. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling like a fraud about to be found out. What makes these forms of worship dangerous isn't that they're evil — it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
The freedom he ends on is deliberately unglamorous: "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." And then the reminder, twice: This is water. This is water.
Now the afterlife. Three years later, on September 12, 2008, Wallace killed himself at forty-six. Eight days after that, The Guardian printed the prose version for the first time and pulled a line about "making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head" straight into its standfirst. In 2009 a publisher turned the under-4,000-word talk into a 137-page hardcover gift book, roughly one sentence per page — and cut the line he had actually said on stage about why people who shoot themselves shoot themselves in the head. In 2013 a nine-minute inspirational short film set it to swelling music and went viral; six days later his estate had it taken down on a copyright claim.
A speech that spent its entire length warning against turning insight into a cheap sentiment was made into the template for cheap sentiment. It was never refuted. It was put to exactly the use it diagnosed.
Two-thirds of the way in, Wallace is demonstrating what he calls a "more socially conscious liberal arts form" of his default setting: stuck in end-of-day traffic, disgusted by the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and—
…the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers.— David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College, May 21, 2005 (bracketed note by the transcriber)
He restarts the half-sentence the applause cut off, with a verdict wedged into the middle of it. It is the most precise moment of the morning: the thing he was describing happened in the room, on cue. The audience applauded a piece of self-centered contempt — and that contempt was the specimen he had brought along to put under the microscope.
The same transcript preserves another live artifact. Deep in the long supermarket passage, he inserts a parenthesis of his own: "(et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony)." This is not a polished essay. This is a man standing at a lectern, editing as he goes.
David Foster Wallace was forty-three and teaching writing at Pomona College in California. Infinite Jest, the thousand-page novel that made his name — about an America entertained into helplessness, a tennis academy and a halfway house — was nine years behind him. He had since been struggling with a long novel about the Internal Revenue Service, and he would never finish it.
He was on that platform because two members of the class of 2005, Meredith Farmer and Jackie Giordano-Hayes, nominated him. According to Kenyon's alumni magazine, which later went back to the people who were there, he spent the time before the ceremony in a seminar room in Sunset Cottage, in his Nehru-collared shirt and bandanna, with the pages spread across a table, "covered in ink; he was still revising — cutting, mostly." Farmer remembered the room during the speech: "I was realizing I had never seen people on the edges of their seats at a commencement address. People were so totally focused. They were rapt."
To understand why a famously ironic, hyper-intellectual novelist would stand up and tell graduates that "banal platitudes can have a life or death importance," you need his own history. In his twenties he went through severe depression and addiction, and time in recovery. His biographer D. T. Max has said publicly that the recovery experience shaped this speech's tone directly — a register stripped of dogma and pretension, bent on restating the simplest truths. In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, worn-out slogans really do keep people alive, and it took a writer of Wallace's temperament many years to be willing to admit it.
In front of him sat young people who had just been handed liberal arts degrees, and their parents. What he chose to talk about was not ideals. It was the stretch between thirty and fifty that nobody mentions at commencements: boredom, routine, petty frustration.
He starts with a parable and immediately kicks away his own ladder. Two young fish meet an older fish who says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?"; they swim on, and one eventually asks the other, "What the hell is water?" This, he notes, is the standard requirement of American commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories — one of the genre's "better, less bullshitty conventions." But:
I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, 2005
Next he takes on the cliché everyone in the audience is braced for: that a liberal arts education is less about filling you with knowledge than about "teaching you how to think." Students hate hearing it, he says — getting into a college this good seems like proof you already know how to think. So he twists it. The significant education isn't about the capacity to think; it's about the choice of what to think about.
A second story forces that choice into the open. In a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness, two men are arguing about God with the intensity that arrives after the fourth beer. The atheist says he has actual reasons: last month he was caught away from camp in a blizzard, fifty below, totally lost, and he did try it — he fell to his knees and cried out, "Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me." The religious man says: well then you must believe now, here you are, alive. The atheist rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
The standard liberal arts reading — same experience, two belief templates, two meanings — is fine as far as it goes, Wallace says, but it never asks where the templates come from, as if a person's basic orientation toward the world were hard-wired like shoe size rather than a matter of intentional choice. And then there's the arrogance: the unbeliever is totally certain in dismissing any connection between his prayer and the Eskimos who happened by. Religious dogmatists, he adds, have precisely the same problem:
blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, 2005
Then he turns the knife on himself. Everything in his immediate experience, he says, supports his deep belief that he is the absolute center of the universe, the realest and most important person in existence. Nobody talks about this, because it is socially repulsive — but it is the same for everyone. "It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth." Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world is in front of YOU or behind YOU, on YOUR TV, YOUR monitor.
He is careful to say this is not a lecture about virtue. It is a technical matter: whether you will do the work of altering that factory setting.
What follows is the longest and most famous stretch of the speech, and the most anti-commencement. He asks the graduates to imagine an ordinary adult weekday: eight or ten hours at a challenging white-collar job; tired; you want supper and an hour to unwind. But there's no food at home, so you drive to the supermarket in the worst of the traffic. The store is crowded with everyone else who also just got off work, hideously lit, "infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop." You push a junky cart with one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left through confusing aisles. The checkout line is impossibly long. And at the end of it you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is "the absolute voice of death." He is enormously patient about this, detailed right down to the wheel.
The point, he says, is not that any of this is unpleasant. The point is that this petty, frustrating crap is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Traffic jams and long lines give you time to think, and if you don't make a conscious decision about how to think, the default setting takes over: this is all about me, everyone is in my way, look how repulsive and stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed they are. And if you happen to be the more socially conscious type, your default simply points itself elsewhere — at the SUVs, at consumer society, at how our children's children will despise us for wasting the future's fuel. Also automatic. Also the default setting. This is the sentence the applause interrupted.
The alternative he offers is not nobility; it is permission to consider other possibilities. Maybe the Hummer that just cut you off is driven by a father with a hurt or sick child in the next seat, rushing to the hospital — "it is actually I who am in HIS way." Maybe the woman screaming at her kid in line was up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband dying of bone cancer, or is the low-wage clerk who yesterday untangled some horrific red-tape problem for your spouse through a small act of bureaucratic kindness. None of it is likely, he says, but none of it is impossible — "it just depends what you want to consider." And if you have really learned how to pay attention:
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. 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.— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, 2005
The final turn is worship. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, he says, there is actually no such thing as atheism and no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships; the only choice we get is what to worship. The reason to pick some sort of god or spiritual-type thing — "be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles" — is not piety but arithmetic: pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. Worship money and things and you will never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing you will "die a million deaths before they finally grieve you." Worship power and you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power to numb the fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. The insidious thing about these forms of worship, he says, is not that they are evil or sinful — it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings.
He lands on freedom, and takes the word back from the occasion. Our culture grants us the freedom "to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation," and that freedom has much to recommend it. But the most precious kind is one you will not hear discussed 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. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, 2005
The ending is brief. None of this, he says, sounds fun and breezy or grandly inspirational, and please don't dismiss it as "some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon" — it isn't 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 awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water." "This is water." And then the last thing he says to a room full of twenty-two-year-olds: "I wish you way more than luck."
First: the version you have read online is not the one he delivered.
Kenyon released no official transcript. According to the college's alumni magazine, the most widely circulated text came from Devin Thompson, a student at another university and a Wallace fan, who transcribed it from a Hi-8 recording — he "wore out the tape transcribing the speech," then sent it to the Wallace-l mailing list in May 2005. A separate transcription was made from a VHS tape by Kaelin Alexander, class of 2007, for the alumni affairs office. In other words: the "full transcript" the world has been quoting for two decades is a fan's transcription off a videotape. It preserves the live texture — the applause, his own parenthetical about cutting — but it is nobody's authorized text.
A second text exists: the prose version Wallace prepared himself. The Guardian printed it for the first time on September 20, 2008, eight days after his death, noting it was "Adapted from the commencement speech the author gave to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio." That version became the 2009 book. The two texts differ in many sentences, and the differences fall in exactly the worst places. Reading them side by side:
This is not a case of someone falsifying someone else. A man gave a talk and then wrote it up, and both are his. But the consequence is strange and worth holding onto: the most-quoted line about suicide is one he never said aloud, and the line he did say aloud was later cut by his publisher. (More on that below.) Anyone quoting this speech should know which version they are quoting.
Second: for Wallace this was not an eighteen-minute insight. It was a life's project.
As early as 1993, in a long interview with Larry McCaffery, he had already framed the same concern as the job of fiction. Read now, it sounds like the foundation this speech was built on:
Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.— David Foster Wallace, interviewed by Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993
And the supermarket example was expanded into an entire novel. The Pale King, the unfinished book he left behind, follows examiners at an IRS office in Illinois; its explicit subject is boredom and attention. His editor Michael Pietsch assembled it from over a thousand pages organized into some 150 chapters, cutting it to fifty; it was published on April 15, 2011 and was a Pulitzer finalist the following year. Among the author's notes printed at the end is what amounts to the speech in another key:
It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.— David Foster Wallace, author's notes, The Pale King, published 2011
Note where that last image lands: water. Put the notes beside the speech and the speech turns out to be the abstract of a book he could not finish — attention is trainable, and what you have to walk through to train it is not suffering but boredom. Which also means reading the talk as a warm parting gift gets it backwards. It is a technical manual for not dying inside a boring job, written by a man who was stuck on exactly that problem and could not get the book out.
MISUSED · as of 2026-09
The core of the speech — that the default setting is self-centered, that attention can be chosen, that worship is unavoidable — has never been refuted by anyone, and still cuts. But it was propagated as precisely the thing it refused to be: a one-sentence-per-page gift book, an inspirational short film with swelling music, an "everybody worships" poster. It was not overturned. It was manufactured into the disease it diagnosed.
May–June 2005: the transcript escapes from a videotape into a mailing list and is all over the internet within weeks.
2006: the text is formally printed for the first time, in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006.
September 12, 2008: Wallace kills himself at his home in California, aged forty-six. Eight days later The Guardian publishes the prose version, with the line about "making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head" pulled into the standfirst. From this moment almost nobody can read the speech as simply a speech again — every sentence about how not to die inside adult life acquires an automatic second meaning.
April 14, 2009: Little, Brown publishes This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. A talk of under four thousand words is set as a 137-page hardcover, frequently one sentence to a page. The objections came in two layers. One was about form: breaking the sentences onto separate pages gave certain passages a mantra-like weight Wallace had not intended. The other is harder — because of his suicide, the publisher removed the line "They shoot the terrible master." Critics held that altering an author's words is unacceptable if the original meaning is to be preserved. In defense of the cut, the writer Tom Bissell argued that any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace's work "now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it." Both sides have a case; the result is not in dispute. In that book, the sentence in which he explained the mechanism of suicide is gone.
September 2012: D. T. Max publishes the biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, putting Wallace back in the position of a specific, struggling working writer. Around its publication, people in his orbit were already discussing a figure they called "Saint Dave" — a canonization of him as too good, too delicate for this world, which obscured the human being underneath.
May 2013: the production team The Glossary cuts the speech into a nine-minute cinematic short, set to rising music over footage of urban life, and it spreads quickly on YouTube and Vimeo. On May 21 — the speech's eighth anniversary, to the day — the film is taken down following a copyright claim by Wallace's estate. This is probably the sharpest irony in the whole story: a text warning against converting awareness into a consumer product was made into a consumer product, and then retrieved by legal means.
The criticism arrived from two different directions, and both deserve to be taken seriously.
One is political. Writing in Truthdig on May 15, 2013 — during the very days the film was going viral — Alexander Reed Kelly argued that the speech "slides into a mushy, contradictory and relativistic lecture about personal responsibility." His central objection is a real one: Wallace asks you to use your mind to rise above a corrupted society, but that mind was itself shaped by "a dubious university system increasingly directed by corporate interests." Handing a structural problem to individual willpower is too light a prescription.
The other is literary. In Literary Hub on May 17, 2016, Emily Harnett went after the speech's technique directly: Wallace did not transcend the commencement genre, he mastered it — "Tell your audiences that they're too smart to want a certain thing and give it to them anyway." In her account the speech "is without a doubt the most read, most shared, most fan-videoed, most vexingly adored contribution of Wallace's small oeuvre," and the New Sincerity it helped popularize "has always been the rationale for praising smug superficialities and cheap feeling." Her conclusion is not gentle: sincerity, along with footnotes and bandanas, furnishes Wallace's popular legacy — and "like This is Water, it's the worst thing he's ever inflicted on us."
Where does that leave it? What Harnett is attacking is not really the speech so much as its use. Kelly's objection has more weight, but the speech had already conceded the boundary: Wallace says repeatedly that he is not giving moral advice, and that this is hard — "some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to." He was never offering a fix for structural problems. He was offering a way of not being ground down on the days when the structure will not move. What does not survive scrutiny is the practice of forwarding this thing as uplift.
Hence the verdict "misused" rather than "refuted." Nothing has overturned the claim that a default setting exists, or that attention can be chosen. A great deal shows that the speech was rewritten, trimmed, scored to music and stripped of its darkest sentence, until it became the sort of object he would have been the first to see through. He had guarded against this from the stage, asking not to be dismissed as a finger-wagging sermon. The guard did not hold.