CONCEPT
Wakefulness as Discipline
David Foster Wallace’s name for the effortful, never-finished practice of choosing where awareness goes—the daily work of staying conscious of one’s own life against a powerful default current of self-absorbed semi-consciousness, which the technologies of engagement are built to maintain and deepen.
Wakefulness as discipline is the central positive prescription in
David Foster Wallace’s moral vision, delivered most completely in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address and sustained throughout his fiction. His parable of two fish who do not know what water is—who have never had to think about it—is a parable about the default setting: the brain’s automatic tendency to process experience as centered on the self, to move through the world half-asleep in unexamined reaction. Wakefulness is the alternative to this default, and it is not a state that can be achieved and maintained. It is a discipline: an effortful, repeated, often unglamorous act of choice, always against the current, never finished. To be awake, in his sense, is not merely to be conscious of yourself but of others—of the genuine reality and full interiority of the strangers in the supermarket checkout line, the people in the traffic jam, everyone dismissed by