Here’s something else that’s weird but true: 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.

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 body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables…

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re 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’re doing.

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, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace 2005 commencement address Kenyon College 

77 notes

Show

  1. whoisryry reblogged this from mmesurly
  2. thevilley reblogged this from mmesurly
  3. seven993 reblogged this from mmesurly
  4. kimbraissojokes reblogged this from mmesurly
  5. repmekevets reblogged this from lafix
  6. thekiddiskrazy reblogged this from readitsomewhere
  7. apparitionsgoneawry reblogged this from mmesurly
  8. abouliaambition reblogged this from mmesurly
  9. iamquietlyreading reblogged this from mmesurly
  10. morrowplanet reblogged this from dascola
  11. readitsomewhere reblogged this from lafix
  12. damecatoe reblogged this from mmesurly
  13. mmesurly reblogged this from lafix