Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/333446
JOBS for TEAMS | 14 www.jobsfor teams.com Manliness The Art of By Brett & Kate McKay, courtesy of www.artofmanliess.com Editor's note: This is an excerpt from a commencement address au- thor David Foster Wallace gave to the graduates of Kenyon College. Wallace talks about finding meaning in the mundane by choosing to look at things differently. While he denies he is talking about compassion, he argues that the way you construct meaning from your experience can help you find love and fellowship in situations that would otherwise make you feel cynical and annoyed. Thus what he has to say has much import in regards to how to de- velop more empathy for others. For that reason we've published it in conjunc- tion with today's post on cultivating charismatic warmth, but it really has meaning far beyond that context. H ere is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natu- ral, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. 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. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so imme- diate, urgent, real. Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well- adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term… Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: 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 David Foster Wallace on Finding Meaning in the Mundane