“None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

David Foster Wallace

While David Foster Wallace may not have been the embodiment of happiness, his thoughts and ideas are judged and loved by millions on their own. In this commencement speech to Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005, he offers what he’s learned about the importance of perspective as we approach our daily lives – the boring, mundane, repetitive get-up-and-go-to-work-watch-TV-eat-go-to-bed-and-repeat lives that we never tell college graduates about, especially not on graduation day. But these are the real lives we live while we strive to leave a legacy and find happiness.  And as he rightly points out, the first step to happiness is acknowledging that we can choose to think and see the world differently.  I’ve included an excerpt from his speech and the link to the full text below.  Also, there’s a great video of the speech here.

“Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think”. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know 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’re 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…”

- David Foster Wallace, “This is Water,” Commencement Speech at Kenyon College, 2005