This may very well be the most important video I've seen in my life. It's only audio, and is the famous commencement speech by David Foster Wallace, "This is Water". All of you should listen to it when you get a chance:
Otherwise you can also read it in transcript form here: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf
I was so impressed by his eloquence and the way he showed the value of education in both abstract and concrete terms, with examples and analogies. This left an impact on me and codified what I actually have been learning and struggling to do myself in the past few years. I called it "empathy", that we need to learn to see things from others' perspectives and to think in their shoes, and hence act accordingly with kindness and respect. It was such a difficult thing to learn though, for people to truly internalize and do in their day-to-day lives. It was hard getting the point across without seeming patronizing or lecturing, and that's why I'm supremely amazed by how he did it so well without imposing his views on us. He gave his story, and we all learned a little something from there.
In his speech, he called it awareness, to choose consciously how to think and what to think, to be well adjusted and not see everything as being all about yourself.
I realize now his way of putting it is a lot more digestible, and easier for the bright-eyed, proud new graduates to understand. They wouldn't be able to understand empathy the way they can understand awareness from him, from the way his speech laid it out as a self-centric mechanism of being aware and thinking consciously of others. It really illustrates and teaches us what we need to do with our lives, with our day ins and day outs.
I'm so glad that my friend shared this with me. It really changes the way I think when I say things like "they should be better at communicating" or "they should be better at empathy and understanding each other!" when I watch shows like Terrace House. When I observe human interactions that I wholly disapprove of. I realise that the easier way to put it is that they have to be more conscious and aware of others, and put in the effort to choose to think different.
I also feel somewhat a connection to David, by the fact that he's been struggling with depression and in the end committed suicide in 2008 (a mere 3 years after this iconic speech). I've read somewhere that depressed people have a more realistic view of the world, while people who are not depressed are usually over-optimistic and over-confident about how they stand in the world (e.g. they all think they look above average...which can't be possible).
Having gone through depression before in my teens, I saw the world clearly for what it stood, but I could never really express what I meant until now. I've always been advocating empathy and kindness, but now I can point to an alternative approach - this is water.
