This is Water is a commencement speech given to the graduating class of Kenyon University in 2005 by David Foster Wallace. You can listen to it here or read it here. Wallace's point is a little hard to encapsulate and I suspect that most people will read a message of compassion in it and that is there but I don't think that is the point. The point is that you have a choice of how to see the world. This is not some revelatory moment that reinvents your entire life in which you suddenly shift gears and become self actualized into your authentic self living your truth or some other collection of banal platitudes. It is the unglamorous drudgery of continually and methodically redirecting your attention to where your attention is and then actively trying to put it where you want it to be and hopefully where it should be. In modern parlance he is advocating for mindfulness.
Wallace is also implicitly arguing for gratitude, empathy, a certain kind of selflessness. He's not arguing for these out of the deontological imprecation "do this or you are a a bad person" but from the simple fact that the norm is to be submerged in our personal grievances against anything and everything. That's hell. We are awash in the material abundance and personal choices brought on by the richest and most successful civilization in the history of the world and we still aren't happy. Affluenza, first world problems, call it what you will. While I don't think that industrial society and it's consequences have been anything less than marvelous; material well being has failed to bring about a utopia. Is there any cure for the hedonic treadmill. Yes and no. Stay off it. The clamor for personal satisfaction does not satisfy, popularity inevitably fades, power is intrinsically precarious. Below all that, life's little inconveniences, droll dramas, and dreary moments will grind you down by weight of numbers. If your a typical human this will all seem very immediately important. This is water. You are submerged in it and moved by it. You can choose to swim; both in general and with specific intent. You can't escape it but you can act on it just as you are acted on by it. The human default is thoughtless reactivity. It's not a hard habit to break in any given moment but it's the work of a life time to spend every moment pushing against that current. This is Water is about all of the little currents that drag people into miserable and often ugly lives. It's about the choice.
Parts of this speech have aged. It was written before the 2008 financial crash. Mindless consumerism is hardly dead but it feels like it's lost some cultural market share to hyper-partisanship and apocalyptic doom saying. I don't think that undercuts any of the points but others might. Where ever we end up, whatever is going on, be it collapse, ever increasing affluence, or some strange mixture of both, remember:
This too is water.
IRON NODER XVI: MORE STUBBORN-HARD THAN HAMMER'D IRON