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From a 2005 commencement speech (WSJ $$) given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
. . .
“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. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
. . .
I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
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