C'est de l'eau

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" This little story, which sounds like a banal platitude, holds a profound truth: the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

The real value of an education, the kind that truly sets you free, isn't about accumulating knowledge or mastering complex thought. It's about learning how to think, which really means exercising some control over how and what you think. It's about becoming aware of your "default setting" - the ingrained, automatic belief that you are the absolute center of the universe, that your immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. This self-centeredness, while natural, is also the source of much frustration, anger, and a sense of isolation.

Consider the endless, exasperating grind of adult daily life: the crowded grocery store after a long day, the infuriating rush hour traffic, the slow-moving lines, the blaring, soul-killing music. Your default setting will tell you that everyone else is an obstacle, an annoyance, stupid, and inconsiderate, purposefully impeding your progress. You are tired, you are hungry, and you want to be home. The world, in these moments, feels like it's conspiring against you, and you become the victim, stewing in your own righteous indignation.

But here's the thing: you have a choice in how you interpret these mundane, irritating realities. You can consciously choose to look differently. Perhaps the woman with the overflowing cart isn't trying to annoy you, but is exhausted from a double shift and just trying to feed her family. Perhaps the driver cutting you off is rushing to the hospital to see a loved one. This isn't about being naive or overly virtuous; it's about the discipline to consider other possibilities, to realize that other people are just as bored, frustrated, and tired as you are, and that some of them probably have lives far harder and more painful.

This choice, this constant, conscious effort to pay attention and assign meaning, is the work of real freedom. It's difficult, unsexy, and requires daily discipline, but it's the only way to avoid going through your comfortable, prosperous life dead, unconscious, a slave to your own head and its default setting of being imperially alone. Because in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as not worshipping; everyone worships something.

If you worship money and things, you will never feel like you have enough. If you worship power, you will live in fear and constantly seek more control. If you worship your intellect, you will feel like a fraud, always on the verge of being exposed. The insidious thing about these forms of worship is that they are unconscious; they are default settings you slip into, day after day, without ever fully realizing what you're doing.

The Capital-T Truth is not about lofty philosophical questions of life after death. It is about life before death. It is about simple awareness: awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over again, "This is water." "This is water." It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world, but it is the true freedom that a real education should provide: the ability to choose what has meaning and what doesn't, and to choose to be empathetic and compassionate. The alternative is unconsciousness, the rat race, and the constant, gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.