🌊 Your Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master 🔗

An exploration of David Foster Wallace’s brilliant “This is Water” speech.

If you have ever stumbled upon the popular After Skool animation titled “Your Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master,” you have experienced a slice of one of the most profound speeches of the 21st century.

The audio is excerpted from the late David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address to the graduating class of Kenyon College, widely known as “This is Water.”

Far from a standard congratulatory graduation speech, Wallace delivered a piercingly honest survival guide for the mundane, frustrating, and exhausting realities of adult life. Below is a structured look at the core philosophy of the speech, combining key excerpts with the context needed to truly absorb its message.

📑 Table of Contents 🔗

🐟 What the Hell is Water? 🔗

The speech begins with a simple, mildly humorous parable about awareness:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”

The point of the fish story is not to be a wise old fish. The point is that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

We live completely immersed in our own beliefs, assumptions, and environments, often without ever recognizing they exist.

🧠 The Terrible Master 🔗

A liberal arts education is often said to teach you “how to think.” Wallace argues that this cliché actually masks a much deeper truth: learning how to think means learning how to exercise control over what you think about.

“Learning how to think 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 construct meaning from experience.”

If you cannot or will not exercise this choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. This leads directly to the core concept of the After Skool animation:

“Think of the old cliché about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master.”

If you don’t control your mind, it controls you. Left to its own devices, your mind will convince you that you are the absolute center of the universe.

🛒 The Default Setting: Traffic and Supermarkets 🔗

Wallace points out that our natural, hard-wired state at birth is deep self-centeredness.

“Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor.”

This “default setting” becomes dangerous in the day-to-day trenches of adult life—the traffic jams, the crowded supermarket aisles, the long checkout lines after a tiring day of work. If we operate on our default setting, we will automatically assume that everyone else is just in our way. We will view the SUV cutting us off or the slow cashier as personal affronts to our valuable time.

But we have a choice. We can choose to look at the situation differently. We can choose to realize that the person in the SUV might be rushing a sick child to the hospital, or that the cashier has a far more tedious, painful job than we do.

“The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.”

🗽 Choosing What to Worship 🔗

In the adult world, Wallace argues, there is no such thing as atheism. Everybody worships something. The only choice we get is what to worship.

If we choose to worship the unconscious, default things, they will eat us alive:

• Worship money and things, and you will never have enough.
• Worship your body and beauty, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
• Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, needing ever more power to numb your own fear.
• Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

💧 True Freedom 🔗

The alternative to the default setting is finding real freedom. It isn’t about financial independence or doing whatever you want.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

The whole trick is keeping this truth up front in daily consciousness.

“This is water. This is water.”

📝 Key Takeaways for Daily Life 🔗

1. Check your default setting: When you feel angry or frustrated in mundane situations (like traffic or lines), recognize that this is your hard-wired self-centeredness taking over.
2. Choose your focus: You cannot always control your circumstances, but you have absolute power over how you construct meaning from them.
3. Be mindful of your “worship”: Notice what you assign ultimate value to. If you tie your self-worth to money, looks, or intellect, you will eventually feel empty.
4. Practice petty sacrifices: Real freedom is found in the discipline of caring for others in small, unglamorous ways every single day.

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