Summary Of David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech

The commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in the autumn of 2005, is a very deep speech that examines the whole idea of a Liberal Arts education at an extremely deep and intellectual level. In the 22 minute long speech Wallace talks about how higher education not only teaches you to think but “how to exercise some control over how and what you think.” (Wallace). Wallace later in his speech stresses the importance of this level of thinking by saying “if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed” (Wallace) What he means by saying this is that if you cannot think at a higher level and make sense of real world problems your life will become meaningless and you will become dead inside your head.

Wallace stresses the idea that all people really can think about in their day to day lives is themselves. To explain this Wallace uses the story of people in rush-hour trying to shop at the grocery store and getting aggravated when there aren’t enough registers open to check out their purchases. He uses this example to describe how people make themselves the center of the universe and how their own needs should be met before anyone else’s own. Wallace is trying to describe how higher education helps people think more clearly, and how the knowledge obtained also helps to make your mind more capable of evaluating situations and how they affect more than just one’s own

This has come after years of being raised in a close minded environment. I have also had many life experience that make me step back and try to look at the bigger picture and consider that I am not the only person on earth and I am not the only one with problems and issues. My default settings are growing, I am and have been learning to look at the large problems in life, such as when I deal with a rude person in line to get gas I try to understand that even though they are being rude I do not know their whole problem or what they are dealing with in their lives. It often is easy to get upset given a situation like this but when you start to look at the world with a mindset such as Wallace’s the world really will seem to open up to