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The role of self - concept in everyone's life
The role of self - concept in everyone's life
The role of self - concept in everyone's life
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David Foster Wallace, the author of This Is Water, mentions a theory about oneself in his commencement speech. The theory consists of oneself to think that I am the center of the world.
And also my quick needs and feelings are what ought to decide the world 's priorities. However, Wallace claims that this is the automatic, unconscious way of adult life that many may choose to follow and not be aware of it. I agree that my way of life shouldn’t just be about me, but about others as well. It’s important to think about others because Wallace claims that it’s essential to open up your mind to think about others around you. He stresses the way that the banality about “teaching you how to think" is really shorthand for a thought that is a great deal more genuine. As many may not be aware, “Learning how to think” is the thing that we ought to really give careful consideration to. Because when we familiarize ourselves with this concept, we learn how to employ some control over our thinking. According to Wallace, it is incomprehensibly difficult to do this, “To stay conscious and alive, day in and day out” without stopping for even a minute. Wallace informs us that we should “learn how to think.” By this he means that we have to be conscious and aware enough to choose what to pay attention to daily. Also, that we ought
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We have to decide how to think and what to pay attention to. If our “natural default-setting” is being pissed and miserable, then we will never be happy in life. We can’t think that everything is all about “ME.” And that everyone around us is in our way. We shouldn’t whine that we worked so hard and we can’t even go home and loosen up after work because of all the people around us at the supermarket. Instead, we should learn to pay attention to others around us. We should change our “natural default-setting.” Because if we do so, we will be much happier in life and we will start to look at the things around us
Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, conveys, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”. In other words, Aristotle states that the gaining of self-knowledge provides an individual with the ability to know one’s personal gifts and accountabilities. To start one’s adult life a person must pursue the journey of self-discovery to learn in depth about their skills and weaknesses. Individuals must find themselves through the limitations and ordeals that they face during their voyage for self-awareness. For example, in Tim O’Brien’s short story, “On the Rainy River”, the narrator shares his story about self-discovery.
In his essay, “Deciderization; 2007,” David Foster Wallace Argues: Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filter, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high- entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; its continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clear as I can put it. What Wallace is trying to say that the people of today’s world are either Objective or subjective and nothing in between; therefore, the objective type of people are all
It is common for human beings, as a race, to fall into the comforts of routine – living each day similar to days before and days to come. Unfortunately, it is often too late before one even realizes that they have fallen into this mundane way of living in which each day is completed rather than lived, as explained by David Foster Wallace in “This Is Water”. This commencement speech warned graduating students of the dangers of submitting to our “default settings” of unconscious decisions and beliefs (Wallace 234). However, this dangerous way of living is no new disability of today’s human race. Socrates warned the people of his time: “A life unaware is a life not worth living” and who is to say he wasn’t completely right? A topic of long debate also includes the kind of influence that consciously-controlled thoughts can have on the physical body. A year after Wallace’s speech, neurobiologist Helen Pilcher, published “The New Witch Doctor: How Belief Can Kill”, which explains the influence of the mind and individual beliefs on the quality of one’s life. Together, both authors illustrate how detrimental a life lived unaware of one’s own thoughts and beliefs can be on the body and spirit. And though it is easy to live by
The speech is arranged into short paragraphs, providing an example in almost every one. Everyone is familiar with commencement speeches. They are usually used to congratulate a group of people and tend to be looking towards the future. Instead of congratulating the students at Kenyon College, Wallace challenges them. The essay opens with a metaphor about two young fish that do not realize what water is, setting the tone for the rest of the speech. Wallace proceeds to describe how completely oblivious society is to the world around us, just like the fish. Wallace supports this claim through examples within the speech. His use of examples rather than facts or statistics weakens his claim. If more facts or statistics were used his claim would become more convincing. His rationalization come in the form of the short stories that illustrate the choices people make in their everyday lives. He...
...old, xenophobic white men don’t want just anyone off the street joining them for intellectual discussions over Sunday tea . This is why Wallace advocates for students in high school and college to learn SWE; if students are able to present themselves in a more erudite and intellectual manner by using SWE, it can provide them with more opportunities to ascend the “social ladder” as they will have a stronger foundation for academic and professional success. Using SWE will not guarantee that a student will become a doctor or a lawyer, however, they will have the opportunity to expand their education and achieve that ranking if they wish.
In This is Water, Wallace effectively uses logical reasoning and the parable of the religious man and the atheist man to explain how consciousness is a choice, not an unalterable state. To do this, Wallace states that in many cases, “A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” Using logical reasoning, Wallace’s own admission reminds his audience that they are also often wrong, as, logically, humans are not perfect and make periodic mistakes. Once he establishes that people can be wrong, he returns to the parable of the two men and claims “…the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.” This idea is familiar to his educated audience, as he claims it is one of the primary foundations of a liberal arts education. Thus, Wallace uses his audienc...
In David Foster Wallace’s speech later made in the book This is Water Wallace lectures a group of soon to be college graduates about the meaning of a higher level of thinking, and on the importance of a well-trained mind that is capable of thinking outside of your own self-centered universe. In his speech he hits a vein with me and really makes me consider how I deal with day to day life and how I view every situation that I come across. I have taken away from this speech and response a sense of self check about how my default settings work and how I place my own value in the
The philosopher is presenting complex image with many aspects to illustrate relatively simple problem which makes his writing appealing only to narrow circle of people usually enough educated to find an absolute truth by themselves. His style is too complicated to be appropriate for masses; complicated vocabulary and syntax that is not used anymore. Plato’s relating to the real problem right in the end of his work giving no time to think about it throughout his argument. Basically what he is doing is explaining the problem and then presenting it. In the end he just leaves the reader all alone without further explanation. David Foster Wallace has also tried to convince people that there is something more to the world that can be seen. However, Wallace’s Commencement Speech is very different from Plato’s allegory. I his speech Wallace is presenting his ideas in a simple manner by short stories that anyone can relate to and because of this it makes him more convincing and persuasive. Right in the beginning of the speech he relates to the main topic by story about fishes that allows his audience to think about the main problem along his speech. This move is undoubtedly more effective because it lets audience focus and contemplate on what is important, on what relates to the main topic during whole
Attentiveness is characterized with being more observant, thoughtful, and considerate of others. This specific trait will help us understand one another and the world around us much better because it allows us to see and appreciate the little things we often take for granted. Being attentive helps us see the world more clearly because only then are we not blinded by our own thought and feelings that we are unable to see how similar we are to one another; we all share the same thoughts and feelings. In “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace stated everyone is always rushing to get to different places; placing our needs and wants above others and how this lack of awareness of the world around us is only drifting us apart. Wallace uses an example
From the moment people were born, different situation began to show up, with sad, happy and angry as our response. Two out of three are negative emotions; this is going to be hard if people want to keep themselves happy. As people are growing, people have to deal with others to make friends or further relationships. Responsibility will show up especially we need to take care of those who are close.
How successful and happy we are is often defined not by what happens to us, but rather, by how we react to the events in our lives. It is our subconscious beliefs about ourselves and the world around us that determine whether the reactions are positive or negative and whether the resulting outcome helps us or sabotages us.
Well, there are instances in our lives when we don’t always get the things that we want and sometimes we do things unexpectedly in the most unexpected time not realizing the effects we will end up with. Yes, its true that we do want things to be done at our own pace, time and style. We as humans have many desires in life, may it be success, wealth, power, and the like. We all want to conquer the world and unravel extraordinary things. However, these desires often overshadow and overpower us. Oftentimes in our lives we as humans just can’t have that too much patience to dwell with the many annoying and irrational things in our lives. Having to bear with all this nonsense makes us grumpy, moody
I completely agree with David Wallace about how people always consider themselves as the center of everything. I used to think like that all the time when I was in middle school and freshman in high school when I moved to US. Back when I moved here I always thought that god was giving me all the problems because I didn’t know any English and it was hard time for me and everyday it was just miserable. But later, all of a sudden I realized that I’m very lucky to at least be alive and there are others out there who are dying or losing loved ones because of cancer, tumor or some deadly disease. Well again we all are human being and we’re selfish one way or another and put our problems first. I always put our problems above the world. This may seem harsh to people but the truth is that we’re so deepened in our life and our problems that we can’t see how big problems other people have or how this world is dying by pollution. I always think that I am the center of the world when the truth is that I’m not in fact none of us are. Before I never tried to put myself in other person’s shoe. It’s hard. But then I tried to think that why
William Golding, in “Thinking as a Hobby”, places people into three different categories of thought. His categories start from grade-three thinking and follow through to grade-one thinking, each highlighting a different method of thought represented in the population.
When we are young children, we are introduced to the concept of "living happily ever after". This is a fairy-tale emotional state of absolute happiness, where nothing really happens, and nothing even seems to matter. It is a state of feeling good all the time. In fairy tales, this feeling is usually found in fulfilling marriages, royal castles, singing birds and laughing children. In real life, an even-keeled mood is more psychologically healthy than a mood in which you frequently achieve great heights of happiness. Furthermore, when you ask people what makes their lives worth living, they rarely mention their mood. They are more likely to talk about what they find meaningful, such as their work or relationships. Research suggests that if you focus too much on trying to feel good all the time, you’ll actually undermine your ability to ever feel good because no amount of feeling good will be satisfying to you. If feeling good all the time were the only requirement for happiness, then a person who uses cocaine every day would be extremely happy. In our endless struggle for more money, more love and more security, we have forgotten the most fundamental fact: happiness is not caused by possessions or social positions, and can in fact be experienced in any daily activity. We have made happiness a utopia: expensive, complicated, and unreachable.