22. This is Water - David Foster Wallace (📱)

Rating 9/10

Reading Notes:

liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about, quote, “teaching you how to think.”

But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we are supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: To be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I ten to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.

Instead of paying attention to what’s going on inside me.

“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

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.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with 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.”

“These Eskimos might be much more than they seem.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this – to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out. Your education really is the job of a lifetime, and it commences – now.