Blog #5- "David Foster Wallace, In His Own Words"

     For this commencement speech, David Foster Wallace takes a nontraditional approach when addressing education and how it applies to young adults graduating college and entering the real world. Wallace actually tells college graduates the Truth about the reality of adult life by reiterating the frustration, boredom, and selfishness that encompass such a life. The one piece that intrigued me the most was what Wallace calls our "natural default setting," a self-fish, narrow-minded way of thinking and the greatest obstacle of adult life. Education plays a vital role in that it is about gaining awareness of our default setting, not acquiring knowledge as we were taught to think. It is about harnessing the will and effort to think differently about people and problems we will encounter "day in day out."