It's unfortunate that we only talk about people when they're dead, but I can't think of a better system. Birthdays, maybe?

Prominent author David Foster Wallace committed suicide last week, so his life and work have been all over the place for the past few days. I came across a commencement address he gave in 2005 that has so many beautiful things in it that I want to quote it all.

[E]verything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

. . .

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. . . . 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.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

The full text can be found here. (Just ignore the fact that they misspelled "memoriam." It's Latin; give them a break)