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Vacation lessons in grace

I took last week off as the summer was winding down for my boys with school bells nearing. While the summer’s been great it’s mostly been for other people – getting camps sorted, arranging a trip to the East Coast, the futile effort of trying to get tween and teenage boys to do anything non-game related.

So of course with all my free time last week I cleaned. Got rid of a bunch of stuff, and tell you what, the psychic weight that’s released by decluttering is a drug. One thing I ran across that didn’t go to the bin or Goodwill was a transcript of the commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 by the writer David Foster Wallace. I call it “This is Water,” but I’m not sure that’s its proper title.

Ah, the gay 90s, when telephone books, I mean novels, by David Foster Wallace and Don Dellilo, and so many others, weren’t just amazing doorstops but also amazing works of art. Wallace’s Infinite Jest became a benchmark for how serious you were about literary fiction. Beyond the hype, though, there aren’t many books I still think about as often as I do about that gorgeous, footnoted behemoth. Turns out his nonfiction is just as good, many say better, than his fiction (if you haven’t please check out A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again). And so I was already in the bag for him when that commencement speech was given.

The tl;dr is that we risk a monotone and robotic existence if we forget our empathy towards others. Wallace uses the framework of a default mode, of being completely self-centered, as it’s all we actually truly know of the world. And so by default we tend to see others as obstacles in our way who deserve scorn on a fraught trip to the grocery store after a long day at work. Frustration, anxiety, selfishness, all of these are defaults. The key is to adjust so that others become human. Maybe that guy who’s taking forever in line is having the worst day of his life. Maybe the SUV that cut you off is trying to rush a s sick child to the hospital. Wallace asks us to think with this rubric in mind.

So what about the title? Two young fish come across an older fish, who asks them, “how’s the water?” The two fish swim away and one says to the other, “what the hell is water?”

We’re all swimming in the default mode, and it’s very hard to reset, to adjust. That message resonated with me to the point where I made “this is water” into a mantra of sorts that I’d use to remind myself to see others around me as possibly having a terrible time. To give them grace. I must have done that for a decade or so after I first read the speech. But then it slipped out of my repertoire.

“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,” Wallace told the students that day.

A few years ago, after my wife passed away, I was one of those people having the worst day of their lives. Over and over. I don’t remember several months after she died. Nothing mattered, except looking out for my boys. It makes me sad that I forgot about my Wallace-inspired mantra, that this is water disappeared during a very hard time in my life. But again, by cleaning shit out, you find things that weren’t meant to be lost.

So if you’ve read this far you’re probably wondering how in the hell I’m going to link this to crypto or web3 or blockchain. The idea of empathy, or grace, originally came to me after learning about more crypto skepticism – and, per usual, strikingly uninformed skepticism at that – from the New York Times and Washington Post. The Times, certainly, has never understood crypto, nor cared to, all the while bashing it in various ways. See this write up for more detail on how mainstream columnists like Paul Krugman and the editorial board at the Post are still ignorant of a technology they nonetheless despise.

But I don’t feel like writing more about the naysayers. I’m tired of it, and in a similar vein to a lot of what I’ve written in this space lately, crypto doesn’t need me to defend it. Crypto doesn’t need me at all. It doesn’t need pundits or editorialist who don’t put their name to their work. It’ll keep going no matter what. That’s one thing I admire about it.

So instead, I had a nice vacation where I actually forgot what day of the week it was. And I was reacquainted with an old friend, Mr. Wallace. So I’m not going to let the persistent ignorance bother me, and instead I’ll say under my breath, “this is water.” — Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.