In David Foster Wallace’s “Commencement Speech” he exclaims that, “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence… It is our default-setting, hard wired into our boards at birth.”(653). He also goes on to argue that someone can break out of this default way of thinking and achieve a selfless awareness of other peoples lives and experiences. Some argue that you can permanently change your way of thinking so that you become completely aware of other people, and correct your immediate way of thinking. Though some may be able to achieve selflessness, a person cannot entirely escape their natural self-centeredness because that person will always hold some deeper intention for gaining some sort of benefit on a personal level.
The default state of mind is something embedded into every person when their born, since they only experience what is immediately around them naturally everyone is selfish. Wallace explains that, “… thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.”(656). Everyone tends to think this way without recognizing because you tend to believe only what you see or hear so the world does revolve around you as far as you are concerned. It is easy to go about life unconsciously performing in this default state of mind because that is what humans are best at. The hard task is correcting that way of thinking to have a more selfless look on life. Achieving selflessness or