The speech starts with a parable highlighting the absurdity of anthropomorphic fish not knowing what water is. The story is meant to underscore humanity’s frenetic, ruminative, and inherently self-centered perceptions. The most obvious aspects of reality are constantly overlooked. Wallace suggests that this mode of being is natural: “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 center of” (3). The realness of other people’s thoughts and feelings comes into question because the self is urgent, omnipresent, and demanding. He contends that the mind’s default settings are not conducive to happiness, saying, “a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded” (3). The mind, which relies on certainties to construct meaning, is its own worst enemy.

Wallace serves up his own struggles with mindfulness as an example:

my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.