This Book Changed My Life 🐟

📚 Book: This Is Water

🧔 Author: David Foster Wallace

🤷‍♂️ In 1 sentence: This book will take you less than 30 minutes to read and teach you how to react to life with empathy and kindness.

💡Quotes that stuck with me:

“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?’”

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“But the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.”

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“It’s about the real value of real education, which has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness – awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sights all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water. This is water.’”

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“The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.”

💭 My experience with this book

It’s not actually a book, it’s a speech. And I didn’t read it the first time I came across it, I heard it in this YouTube video.

But at the ripe age of 24, this video couldn’t have come sooner. For months after seeing it, I repeated the speech’s title, “this is water” over and over in my head and under my breath, as I forced myself through “the day-to-day trenches of adult existence.”

The speech’s main takeaway is to ‘learn how to think’. In other words, you can choose how you think about something. You can choose to react to a situation by jumping to conclusions and judgements – it’s easy to let your anger explode onto the entitled, fucking asshole that dangerously just cut you off in peak hour traffic.

An alternative route of thought and reaction is to just fucking take a second and let it the fuck go. You can choose to be empathetic and think, “Hey, that person might have a dad with Alzheimer’s and he’s escaped from their house. Someone has just found him wandering several miles away and now this person needs to get to him fast because their dad is lost and scared, and so are they.’ It seems unlikely, but I’ve been that asshole for that reason… and I’ve also been an asshole for no good reason at all.

Where is the rage going to get you when you let it take over? I have let my rage ruin countless days, push people away, make dents in my wall and ultimately make me hate myself even more.

After reading this book, I began choosing how to think. This is an example of how I think on good days, ‘I have no idea why this shop assistant is being rude to me, but it’s likely not about me. This person is having a shit day or month or year and I feel for them. I hope their day gets better.’

On a bad day, I’ll let one tiny interaction completely derail my day. In turn, my petulance probably ruins other people’s days. Everyone loses.

I guess the wisdom of “This Is Water” is about living with others in a way to allows you to live with yourself. Having said that, David Foster Wallace tragically took his own life in 2008. He was only 46. He did not make it to “fifty, without wanting to shoot [himself] in the head.” But I think he really tried, which is all we can do.