Inspirational Graduation Speeches: If you worship money and things, then you will never have enough

The fourth speech we have chosen to review is David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College. The address is premised on life and work. In this address, Wallance challenges the graduates to resist any form of mental conditioning that a selfish and negative attitude in life may force them to ascribe to.

He says thinking that way tends to be easy and automatic because it is in our natural default setting. It does not 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.”

He also discourages graduates from deriving their value from material possessions and the pride of life. He says everyone in this life has something they worship and according to him the things from which we derive our value are the things we worship.

Premised on that notion, he opines that people that worship material possessions never attain the kind of value that they attach to such possessions.

“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth.”

“Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.”

“Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”

“On one level, we all know this stuff already,” Wallace asserts, “it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.”

Read Wallace’s Speech here

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