This is water

Two young fish are swimming and meet an older one, and the latter, passing by them, nods her head and says to them: "Good morning, youth. What's the water like?'

And these two young fish continue to swim until finally one turns to the other and says, "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard trick in American speeches at the end of the school year, I mean the use of didactic stories in the register of parables.

This story is actually one of the better ones in that genre, one of those that aren't that much bullshit, but if you think I'm here to introduce myself as a wise old fish to explain to you young fish what water is, you're wrong.

I'm not a wise old fish.

The direct point of the fish story is simple: the most obvious, most widespread facts are often the hardest to see and talk about.

When this is phrased as a sentence, of course, it's just a trite platitude - but the fact is that in the trenches of everyday adult life, trite platitudes can have life-and-death significance.

Or at least that's what I want to suggest to you on this bright and beautiful morning.

HOW TO THINK: Of course, the key ingredient of such speeches is that I should talk about the meaning of your humanities education, to explain how the diploma you will receive has some real human meaning, and not just material value.

Then let's talk about the most widespread cliché from such speeches, which is that a humanistic education should not so much provide you with knowledge as it should "teach you how to think".

If you're anything like me when I was a student, that's something you never like to hear, and you even feel a little offended by the claim that someone should teach you how to think, because the fact that you got into such a good college it acts as proof that you already know how to think.

But I will assert here that in the end it turns out that this cliché is not offensive at all, because really teaching someone about thinking, which should happen in places like this, does not mean teaching him how to think, but about choosing what to think about.

If the topic of complete freedom of choice in what to think about seems too banal and obvious to waste time on, I invite you to think about fish and water and, at least for a few minutes, put your skepticism about the value of the completely obvious into brackets.

Here is another didactic story.

Two guys are sitting together in a bar in the middle of some wilderness in Alaska.

One of them believes in God, the other is an atheist, and they are now debating the existence of God with that special intensity that appears after about the fourth beer.

And then the atheist says: "Look, it's not that I don't have reasons not to believe in God." Not that I haven't experimented with God and prayers. Just last month I got lost in a terrible blizzard far from the camp, I couldn't see my finger in front of my nose, it was minus fifty and I had no idea where I was at all, and then I did it, I fell on my knees, in the snow, and cried: God, if you exist, I'm lost in a blizzard and I'll die if you don't help me.''

And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all confused and says: "Okay, so now you're a believer too, because you're finally here, alive and well."

The atheist rolls his eyes as if he thinks the religious guy is a total fool: "Oh no, man, what happened was that two Eskimos showed up and they were, well, passing by, and they showed me how to get back to the camp."

It is easy to miss this story through the filter of standard humanistic analysis: A completely identical experience can represent two completely different things to two different people, depending on their ways of thinking, that is, the ways in which they create the meaning of their experiences.

Since we value tolerance and diversity of opinion, in our humanistic analysis we do not want to assert that one type is right and the other is wrong.

That's fine, except that we never even discuss where their worldviews and beliefs come from, I mean, where inside of two types.

It is as if the most basic orientation towards the world and the meaning of each person's experience is part of their automatic hardware, like height or number of shoes, or is absorbed from culture, like language.

It's as if making sense out of experience isn't really a matter of deliberate personal decision, of conscious choice.

Also, there is arrogance.

The atheist is totally and irritatingly convinced of his rejection of the possibility that the Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer.

It is also true that there are masses of religious people who are irritatingly sure of their own interpretations.

They are probably even more disgusting than atheists, at least to most of us here, but the truth is that the problem of dogmatically religious people is the same as the problem of the atheist in our story: arrogance, blind certainty, a closed mind that is so much like a prison so perfect that the prisoner is not actually aware that he was detained.

I want to say that I think this is one part of what the humanist mantra about "learning how to think" should say: to be just a little less arrogant, to have at least a little "critical caution" towards oneself and the things one we are sure… because a large percentage of the things we tend to think are automatically right, actually, as it turns out, are total mistakes and misconceptions.

I learned that the hard way, so I guess you graduates will have to learn it that way too.

THE CENTER OF THE WORLD: Here is an example of the utter falsity of what I am inclined to think is absolutely certain to be so.

Every bit of my immediate experience supports my deep conviction that I am the absolute center of the universe, the most real, the most alive and the most important person in existence.

We rarely think about this kind of natural basic self-centeredness, because it is so socially repulsive, but it still exists more or less equally for all of us, somewhere deep within us.

That's how we're set up by default, in our hardware, as soon as we're born.

Think about it: There is no experience that you have had without you being at the center of it.

The world you experience is in front of you, or behind you, to the left or to the right of you, on the TV screen, on the monitor or anywhere.

The thoughts and feelings of other people must somehow be communicated to you, and your own are so direct, urgent, real.

You see what I mean.

But please don't worry, I don't intend to preach to you about compassion, others-centeredness, or all the so-called "virtues."

It's not a matter of virtue - it's about my own choice to possibly somehow change or break free from my natural default hardware, which is deeply and literally self-centered and sees everything only through its own glasses.

People who can setting your defaults like this are what are commonly said to be, quote, "well adjusted," and this term, I suggest, is no accident.

Given the academic context here, the question arises: how much of this setting is conditioned by actual knowledge or intellect.

The answer, unsurprisingly, is that it depends on the kind of knowledge we're talking about.

Probably the greatest danger of an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it fosters a tendency to approach life too intellectually, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's happening right in front of my eyes.

Instead of constantly paying attention to what is happening inside of me.

I'm sure you all already know how difficult it is to remain attentive and receptive to the world around you, and not to be constantly hypnotized by a constant monologue in your head.

What you don't know yet is how much is at stake in that fight.

In the twenty years that have passed since I graduated, I have gradually come to understand the stakes at stake and understand how the humanist cliché of "learning how to think" is actually shorthand for a very deep and important truth.

"Learning how to think" actually means learning how to have some kind of control over it kako we also think about what we think.

It means being aware enough and conscientious enough to you choose what are you paying attention to and yes you choose how you create meaning from experience.

Because if you can't or won't make that choice in your adult life, you're going to be totally screwed.

Think of the old cliché about reason being "an excellent servant but a bad master."

This one, like many clichés, sounds stupid and banal on the surface, but actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

It is no coincidence that adults who commit suicide almost always shoot themselves in the… the head.

And the truth is that most of these suicide bombers were actually dead long before they pulled the trigger.

And I tell you what the real value of your humanities education should be, without quibbling: to prevent you from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead and unconscious, slaves to your heads and that innate disposition to be uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day after day.

This may sound like hyperbole or abstract nonsense.

Let's be specific, then.

It is a clear fact that you, as recent graduates, have no idea what it really means to live day by day.

There are significant parts of adult life in America that are never discussed in these speeches.

These include boredom, routine and petty frustrations.

Your parents and other elders present here know very well what I am talking about.

For example, let's take an average adult's day, when you get up in the morning, you go to your challenging office job that requires a college degree and you work there for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you are tired and cranky and you just want to come home, have a nice dinner , maybe relax for a few hours and go to bed early because tomorrow you have to get up early again and start all over again.

But then you remember that you have no food at home - you didn't have time to shop during the week because of your demanding job - so after work you get in the car and drive to the supermarket.

BOREDOM AND ROUTINE: It's the end of the working day and the traffic is very heavy and it takes you longer than usual to get to the store, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course that's the part of the day when other working people also come to buy household goods supplies and the whole shop is bathed in that hideous fluorescent light and blaring with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop music and it's really the last place in the world you'd want to be, but it's just impossible to speed you go in and out.

And you have to wander through that huge, overlit store, go around the cluttered shelves to find what you need, and you have to maneuver that ugly cart among all the other tired, busy people with carts, and among them, of course, there are glacially slow old men and big people and hyperactive kids, all of them blocking the shelves, and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite when you ask them to let you you pass, and so, finally, you have everything you need for dinner in your cart, but now not enough cash registers are open, even though there is a standard-end-of-the-working-day rush, and the line in front of the cash register is incredibly long.

It's stupid and it makes you furious, but you can't direct your anger at the lady working the cash register, who has too much work to do in the workplace whose daily boredom and meaninglessness exceeds the imagination of any of us from some prestigious college... and well, you are finally at the cash register , pay for your food, wait for the machine to validate your check or card, and wait for it to say, "Have a nice day" in a voice that is an absolute voice death.

And then you have to somehow push ugly rustling plastic bags full of your groceries in a cart whose one wheel keeps pulling madly to the left through a bumpy parking lot full of people and garbage and try to load the bags into the car so that, if possible, everything doesn't fall out and scatter in the trunk during the drive to house and then you have to drive home, slowly, through heavy traffic with an intense frequency of jeeps, and so on and so forth.

Each of you has done all this before, of course, but it has not yet become part of your graduated real-life routine, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

But there will be, and there will be many more boring, irritating, seemingly meaningless life routines.

Only that's not the point.

The thing is, it's these kind of frustrating little shits that should be the situations where the possibility of choice comes into play.

Because traffic jams and shelf crowds and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about what to think about and what to pay attention to, I'll be annoyed and miserable every time I go grocery shopping. , because I'm naturally set by default to think that situations like this only concern me mene, my hunger and my tiredness and my desire to just come home, and it will seem to me that the whole world, that everyone else is only there to were in my way, and who the hell are all those people who are in my way.

And when you look at how disgusting most of them are, how stupid they are, like cows, how they have dead eyes and how inhuman they look in line at the cash register, and how annoying and how rude it is that they shout while talking on their cell phones in the middle of the line and how unfair it is: I've been working hard all day, I'm starving and tired, and yet I can't come home to eat and relax because of all these stupid damns People.

Or, of course, if I'm currently in the socially conscious, humanistically-educated mode of my default setting, I can spend a traffic jam at the end of the day full of anger and disgust at all those huge stupid Jeeps blocking entire lanes of the freeway and pickup trucks burning wastefully and selfish for forty gallons of fuel, and I can consider the fact that patriotic or religious stickers are always found on the biggest and nastiest selfish vehicles, which they drive the ugliest, most reckless and aggressive drivers, who usually talk on their mobile phones while crossing the line in front of other cars just to move a stupid six meters forward in the traffic jam, and can think how our children's children will despise us for having used up all the fuel for the future and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled, stupid, selfish and disgusting we all are, and how all that smoked, and so on, and so on…

Look, if I choose to think this way, that's fine, a lot of us do - it's just that this way of thinking is often too easy and automatic, so I don't (mora) be a matter of choice.

Thinking that way is what I default to.

It's the automatic unconscious way I deal with experiencing the boring and frustrating aspects of adult life when I operate under the automatic unconscious belief that I'm the center of the world and that my current needs and feelings are what should prioritize the entire world.

There are, however, obviously different ways of thinking in such situations.

In a traffic jam, when all those vehicles are standing and blocking my way: It is not impossible that some of the people in those jeeps have had terrible traffic accidents in the past and now their driving is traumatic and the therapist recommended that they get a jeep to feel safe enough to drive; or that behind the wheel of the Hummer that has just overtaken me illegally is actually a father whose small child, sick or injured, is lying on the seat next to him, and he is rushing towards the hospital and is, in a way, in a greater and more legitimate hurry than I am, if in fact ja someone who him stands in the way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the possibility that everyone else in line at the supermarket checkout is just as tired and frustrated as I am, and that some of them must have much harder, much more boring and painful lives than mine.

And so on.

Again, I ask you not to think that I am giving you a moral lesson, or that I am telling you how you "should" think that way, or that someone expects you to do it automatically, because it is difficult, because it requires willpower and mental effort, because if you're anything like me, there will be days when you just can't, or consciously don't want to.

But on most days, if you are observant enough and give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at that fat, over-make-up, dead-eyed lady who just yelled at her toddler in the checkout line—maybe she's not usually like that, maybe she hasn't seen an eye in three nights made because she was keeping vigil at the bedside of her husband dying of bone cancer or maybe she's the underpaid clerk at the auto dealership who just yesterday helped your husband or wife solve some paperwork problem with a small act bureaucratic courtesies.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it all depends on what you're willing to think about.

If you're automatically confident that you know what reality is and who and what really matters—if, therefore, you're operating according to a natural default—then you, like me, won't consider possibilities that aren't pointless and frustrating.

If you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know that you have other options.

You will be able to experience the situation of the heat, the crowd, the slowness, the whole little consumerist hell, as something not only meaningful, but also something sacred, something that burns with the same flame and the same power as the stars - as love, compassion, subsurface the unity of all things.

SLOBODA: All that mystical talk is not necessarily true, the only thing that is True with a capital initial "I" is that you need to decide how can you try to see it.

That, I argue, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You have to consciously decide what makes sense and what doesn't.

You must decide what to worship…

Because here is another truth.

In the trenches of adult life, day after day, there really is no such thing as atheism.

There is no such thing as non-worship.

Everyone loves it.

The only choice is what adore.

And a great reason to choose a god or some spiritual type of worship—be it IH or Allah or Yahweh or a witch-mother goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some unbreakable set of ethical principles—is that more or less whatever else you choose will make you worship the living. to eat.

If you worship money and material things – if you think that's where the real meaning of life is – you'll never have enough.

You will never feel like you have enough.

It's true.

Worship your own body and beauty and sex appeal, and you will always feel ugly, and when old age and old age set in, you will die a million times before you actually die.

On one level you already know it - these are things encoded in myths, proverbs, clichés, phrases, epigrams, parables; they are the skeleton of every great story.

The secret is that the truth is visible in our consciousness every day.

Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will never have enough power to banish fear.

Worship your own intellect, the feeling that you are smart - and you will always have the impression that you are a fool, a fraud, always in danger of being exposed.

And so on.

See, the harmful thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful in themselves; the pity is that they are unaware.

They are what we default to.

They are forms of worship that we simply indulge in gradually, day by day, becoming more and more selective in what we see and value, without ever being fully aware of what we are doing.

And the so-called "real world" will not discourage you from functioning in the way you are set up by default, because the so-called "real world" of people, money and power is quite regularly fed with the fuel of fear, contempt, frustration, greed and self-adoration.

Our modern culture has used all this for the purpose of obtaining enormous wealth, comfort and personal freedom.

The freedom of all of us to be the gods of our own little kingdoms bounded by our own skulls, alone at the center of all creation.

There are many reasons to recommend this kind of freedom.

But, of course, there are also other freedoms, and you won't hear much about the kind that is the most precious in this world of victories, success and foiling.

The really important kind of freedom consists of attention, awareness, discipline, effort, the ability to really care about other people and make sacrifices for them, over and over again, in a billion inconspicuous, small, non-sexy ways, every day.

That is true freedom.

That's how you learn how to think.

The alternative is unawareness, a default setting, a struggle for survival - a constant gnawing feeling that we have had and then lost something infinite.

I know this probably doesn't sound fun, playful, or gloriously inspiring the way the main part of an end-of-the-school-year speech should sound.

This is, however, as far as I can see, the truth, mixed in with a lot of rhetorical bullshit.

Obviously, you can think whatever you want about all this.

I'm just asking you not to dismiss this as some sort of sermon from Dr. Laura followed by a menacing forefinger wag.

None of this has anything to do with morality, religion, dogma, or the big popular questions about life after death.

Truth with a capital "I" is about life ago death.

It's about making it to your thirties, or even your fifties, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

This is the real value of a real education, which has nothing to do with grades and titles, and has a lot to do with simple awareness - the awareness that there is what is real and essential, which is hidden, and is always in front of our eyes, and because of which we must to remind ourselves over and over again:

"This is water."

"This is water."

"Those Eskimos may have been more than meets the eye."

It is actually unimaginably difficult - to live consciously, as an adult, day by day.

And that means another cliché is true: Your education really is jest a job that lasts a lifetime, and it begins - now.

I wish you much more than happiness.