This is Milk

    In a commencement speech, David Foster Wallace, powerfully illustrates to graduating seniors how much life can be different depending on how you percieve it. In "This is Water," he tries to convince his audience to be more aware and empathetic of the people around you, being understanding instead of angry and frustrated. He claims that this way of thinking must be done consciously and must overcome the "natural hard-wired default setting" of self-centeredness. Are we all born with this self-centered point of view? I mean sure I was angry at the person who cut me off in traffic, but maybe they had somewhere to be, maybe their mom was about to die, or their son was in a horrible accident, or very likely, theyre just an asshole. Wallace's words are appreciated, and certainly very true: being miserable and angry at every person around you for no reason is unfair to them and unhealthy to yourself, but so is being to empathetic. 

       From my point of view, that guy trying to reach his dying mother was an idiot who I almost rear-ended. I had to hit the brakes and, to me, that's all that mattered. It didn't matter if it was a drunk neckbeard with no regard for other human life, or a fearful son on the way to visit his mother on her deathbed, to me they were the same. Yeah sure, right after the fact, i tried to think up a way to justify his actions but, like Wallace, do i need to give everyone the benefit of the doubt? Maybe I can do both, like a sort of Schrodinger's Cat. This'll be the Schrodinger's Car, until you know that persons story inside the car, they are both an asshole and a person deserving of empathy.  That fish that doesn't understand that he lives in water, has a very small chance of guessing that its called "water" and not something else like "milk." Until that fish learns for sure what it is, he acknowledges its existence, and that's all that's really needed. As much as we want to be aware and understand everything, we aren't omniscient.