This is Water (David Foster Wallace)

  If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.  It’s the truth.  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.  On one level, we all know this stuff already.  It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story.  The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

  Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.  Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.  But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s 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.

  But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about 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 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

To read and/or listen to David Foster Wallace’s complete (and brilliant) 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, and to understand the title and the image above, click here.  You will not regret the time spent.

Image source:  https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

Quotation source