David Foster Wallace's Speech for the Ages

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May 16, 2013

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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.

- David Foster Wallace -

David Foster Wallace's Speech for the Ages

O, the maddening tedium of the everyday responsibilities of adult life! It plagues us because 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 ourselves. In his 2005 commencement address, novelist David Foster Wallace speaks refreshingly about personal empowerment. 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 shares. "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." Excerpts from his talk have been woven into this video that has recently gone viral. { read more }