You Don’t Know Water Until You’ve Left Your Fishbowl
Maarten van Doorn recently published a piece inspired by the late David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech called This Is Water. The speech starts with a humorous parable about perspective:
There are two young fish swimming along who happen to meet an older fish. The older fish nods at them and says:
‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’
The two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and asks:
‘What the hell is water?’
— David Foster Wallace.
What the joke never explains is how the older fish knows what water is, when the young fish don’t. Van Doorn writes:
The message of the fish story is that the most obvious and important realities are the hardest to see. Often, this is because our natural setting is to be self-centered and to interpret everything through this lens of self.
But what makes the older fish so much wiser? We must infer that it is his experience. That is, the older fish only knows about water because he’s been outside the fishbowl.
Maybe one day he was swimming around, and maybe he gets bored or he gets a little startled or something or for whatever reason, he swims up at a tremendous sprint and…
