David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College Commencement Speech 2005

I transcribed this speech myself because I just thought it was so amazing. Any errors are my own. I downloaded the speech from the To The Best of Our Knowledge website at www.ttbook.org


In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism, there is no such thing as not worshipping, everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship and the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual type thing to worship, be it JC, or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wicken mother goddess or the four noble truths or some inviolable set of ethical principles is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life. Then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough, it’s the truth.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age starts showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

On one level we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; The skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth upfront in daily consciousness.

Worship power you will end up feeling weak and afraid and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful, it’s that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They are the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you are doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along on the fuel of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom, the freedom all to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation

This kind of freedom has much to recommend it but of course there are all different kinds of freedom and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad, petty, little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom