I have a hard time responding to the David Foster Wallace speech for a few reasons. First and foremost, I'm 20 years old, and I've only been sentient for a fraction of that time (albeit a large fraction). Because of the little time I've spent in the world, even including my not-overly-but-still sheltered life living in a wealthy and white part of the US, I have a hard time listening to life advice or truths and fully grasping them. I understand what DFW was saying, but I'm not sure if I know it. There is so much I don't know about other people even from the same culture as me let alone any of the multitudes of other cultures that so many people I interact with come from. I can't listen to one man talk about what to expect from life and education and just instantly understand it enough to accept it as truth. It's important to know that I don't distrust DFW (at least not more than I would any other disembodied voice from the Internet), and I don't in any way want to sound angsty, like I'm railing against this old-timer sell-out, I simply cannot respond to his speech in any significant way because I'm a young kid with a billion other plans and thoughts. I think this is going to be a problem for a lot of people. Regardless of the absolutely staggering amount of knowledge available to any of us at any moment in time, almost all of that knowledge will be lost on us until we are ready, making change hard.
In general however, I do believe that the largest benefit of an education is teaching what is worth thinking about, which makes my degree in Art seem much, much more worthwhile, not like I had any doubts.
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