Is The Water Worth It?

In May 2005, the author David Foster Wallace gave the commencement speech at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. The speech was called “This Is Water,” and about halfway through, he hits on a theme that should resonate with us all today. 

In this particular section, he describes in detail the mundane, frustrating, workaday life that the graduates will all surely face.Not the most uplifting picture to paint for a bunch of optimistic, doe-eyed college seniors, but his point, and it’s important, is that all of them have a choice. Not necessarily about the life they’ll choose to live, but how they choose to see that life and the world around them. 

He describes his own “default setting” most days as viewing the events and people around him as annoying, problematic and painful. “It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs are what should determine the world’s priorities,” he says in the speech. 

But he goes on to say that he’s making a conscious effort to avoid that trap and to see the world differently. He says: “...most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.” He describes several other similar examples in the speech, like the possibility that the car that just cut you off in traffic might be driven by a man rushing to take his sick child to the hospital. 

This concept of seeing people and events differently echoes the ancient Ignatian notion of “Presupposition,” which, in a nutshell, says we should all assume people’s intentions are good and give them the benefit of the doubt before jumping to any conclusions or judgment. 

Wallace, a tortured artist with lifelong bouts of depression and addiction, committed suicide three years after the speech at Kenyon.He was 46.  

The internet existed when Wallace gave his speech, but social media did not, for all intents and purposes. Facebook was only a year old andlargely confined to students at Harvard, where the founders were enrolled. It would be years before all the other social media companies bounded onto the world stage and more than three billion people jumped on board. 

I’m not on social media and mostly haven’t been for years. I don’t have accounts on Facebook, X, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok or even LinkedIn. Until recently, I had an account on Nextdoor but only looked at it occasionally. And when I did, I instantly regretted it, which is why I deleted my account. 

Nextdoor describes itself as “an app for neighborhoods where you can get local tips, buy and sell items, and more.”All well and good till you get to the “and more” part, which is where Wallace’s point comes into play. 

Just before I deleted my account, there was a post on Nextdoorcomplaining about Marco Island’s City Council, which is a pretty common theme on the site these days. What started out as a fairly benign but pointed call to action about voting this fallquickly devolved into insults, vitriol and name-calling. Reading the more than fifty comments (at the time) leads one to believe that only nasty, mean, angry people live in Marco, which we all know isn’t true. 

The moderators on the site seem to do their best to keep things civil, but there’s no real rule preventing people from showing their worst selves in full public view or for failing to simply give their neighbor the benefit of the doubt. In a modern ironic twist, some of the nastiest posts are about the moderators themselves, with all sorts of people crowing about “free speech” to justify their nastiness when one of their obviously hurtful or off-base posts is deleted. 

I don’t think any of the original creators of these social sites envisioned them turning into the cesspools they’ve all become, amplifying the coarseness that so dominates public discourse. But that’s what they’ve become. 

It’s sort of a chicken and egg conundrum though, right? Is social media a root cause of our bitterly polarized country, or is it simply reflecting our current reality? 

To me, it’s the former. It’s hard to imagine that our society would be nearly as divided as it is if people weren’t given such an easy soapbox from which to express their opinions in so wide a fashion, with so little forethought or oversight, or to so easily traffic in disinformation. 

When I talk to my friends and family about their social media presence and my lack thereof, I’m continually told something along the lines of... “Yes, but it’s a fun way to stay in touch with people in my life and see what they’re up to.”  Or “I’m only on it for my business.” 

There’s obviously some truth toboth, but is that online connection really worth the price we’re all collectively paying when there are plenty of ways to stay connected outside of social media? 

Numerous recent studies on the effects of social media argue no, it’s not worth it. 

A University of California Davis research paper released this spring said the average person spends 145 minutes a day on social media. Roughly two and a half hours. And that’s the average. 

The paper goes on to say social media negatively impacts our overall well-being by fueling anxiety, depression, loneliness, and FOMO (fear of missing out). It’s all stuff we’ve been hearing and reading about for several years now, but social media’s presence continues to grow in people’s lives. 

Wallace’s speech is called “This Is Water” because he starts it off with the often-told story about an older fish swimming by two younger fish. The older fish says, “How’s the water boys?”  As the older fish swims away, one of the younger ones says to the other, “What the hell is water?” 

Wallace says: “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” 

Maybe it’s time we see social media for the reality it has become - water not worth swimming in.