conscious decisions

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because 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. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. [...] you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship [(body, beauty, allure, power, intellect,...)] 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.

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 in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and 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 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, [...] 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.

[...] 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, Commencement Speech at Kenyon College, 2005-05-21

The whole speech is an inspiring read, (thanks to Maree,) — more inspiring than the commencement speech I heard last weekend.

I would only argue with Wallace in his labelling of societal norms as “our defaults.” Our real defaults are prior to and deeper than our ego-centric urges.

Our real defaults can be re-discovered by disconnecting from societal influences (a la various flavors and degrees of asceticism. (Don’t forget to recycle your television.))

Can they also be discovered by remaining immersed in society? Does it only demand watchful attention? Who that’s interested in cultivating awareness really wants to remain a part of pop culture?