In David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Address, he discusses the value of liberal education, and how it can save lives through the cliché that it teaches you how to think. To expand, Wallace believes that liberal education does this by preparing students to be able to chose how to think, therefore being able to chose to break away from their default setting. Afterall, Wallace explains that our “natural, hard-wired default setting” is “deeply and literally self-centered” and so makes us “interpret everything through this lens of self.” This is dangerous because thinking this way can cause many of the inevitable and infuriatingly boring parts of adult life, like grocery shopping, to be much more painful than necessary. By having the ability
