David Foster Wallace- The Human Person

 

I believe that David Foster Wallace is correct in the idea that life consists of fundamental choices that lie entirely within the human person, and that allow them to engage the world differently.  In his speech, he mentions that we “tend to over- intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside [our] heads, instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right in front of [us].”. This is a credible idea, because sometimes given the fact that we are so blinded by our own problems, it is very hard for us to see everyone else’s.

 In my own life, I can see this with my cousins, who are five and eight years old. While I am babysitting them, they can sometimes surprise me by being so hyper, and out of control. I sometimes wonder how my uncle and aunt can allow them to be so undisciplined and misbehaved at times, but then I realized how it must be from their perspective. They have to deal with very demanding jobs and kid’s activities afterschool.
They have to race around to attend to the schedules of their kids, and themselves, make dinner at home every night and deal with a hyperactive 1- year old dog, who is even bigger than your average grizzly cub. They also have to deal with the drama- filled stories of both a third and  a first grader’s day (which is always entertaining), and handle homework, baths, and bedtime stories, all in less than three hours after they got home. It is hard for me to understand this however, due to the fact that I do not have kids of my own, and I cannot even begin to imagine the amount of work it actually takes.  

Another point that he makes, is also that “‘teaching you how to think’, is actually short for a much deeper more serious idea: ‘Learning how to think.’ This 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 conduct meaning from experience.”
We usually engage this choice by realizing that “the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” At the end of David Foster Wallace’s speech, people are clapping even if he is, in a way, insulting them, because they still understand the importance of what he is saying to them, and that they understand that it is important for them to live life as he has described. “It is about 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.”.