Default Setting

The bold text below is taken from a 2005 commencement speech by David Foster Wallace, quoted in the book How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell:

Wallace gives the students what is basically a brutal description of adult life, in which you find yourself at the “hideously, fluorescently lit”grocery store full of annoying people after a long day of work and a horrible traffic jam. In that moment, you have a choice of how to perceive the situation and the people in it. As it turns out, that choice is basically one of attention.

If I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire just to get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?

This makes room for the possibility, in Wallace’s examples, that the guy in the Hummer who just cut you off is maybe trying to rush a child to the hospital – “and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am – it is actually I who am in his way.” Or that the woman in front of you in line who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered “default setting,” whose only option is to see people as inert beings who are in the way:

But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then your will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

That Wallace frames this as a “choice,” one made against the “default setting,” which speaks to the relationship between discipline, will, and attention.