What the Hell is Water? Breaking Free from Old Perspectives

Your beliefs are a silent force, shaping your reality from the deep recesses of the mind

Since I started university at 30, and spent 6 years completing two degrees, the world changed without me noticing it.

For as long as I can remember, I have put much pride in being open-minded. I love learning new perspectives and I devote much of my time doing this.

So I thought I was protected from being rigid and narrow minded.

Well, I was wrong. Dead wrong.

It’s not that I didn’t read the news or frequented social media during this time.

But I realize now that all my mental bandwidth went to learning and absorbing the material within the framework of university.

The information I encountered elsewhere that wasn’t part of my curriculum was relegated to other types of ‘mental boxes’ categorized as ‘I don’t need to remember this or don’t have to think more deeply about it’.

In other words, it wasn’t deemed as important because (apparently) according to me at the time, you couldn’t learn anything worthwhile from the internet.

I didn’t take the power of social media seriously and it’s all on me.

Social media went from pure entertainment to being a platform where real learning happened. But I failed to notice and realize it.

This symbolizes the power of a belief. Being a millennial, steeped in how the world was back then, 10-15 years ago, my belief didn’t allow for social media to be anything else than entertainment. I unconsciously refused to believe it.

Post graduation, it took me almost another year to see the world as it is right now and not how it was when I younger and at my most impressionable.

Beliefs are powerful things and they will determine the outcome of your life.

The great thing is that we are free to change beliefs at any moment.

But this also entails us being aware of our ideas and beliefs about how the world works.

You’ve had your beliefs for as long as you can remember so they’ve become invisible to you. You think you observe the world ‘just as it is’.

In his speech “This is water”, David Foster Wallace talks about a younger fish meeting an older fish asking “Good morning, how’s the water?”, whereby the older fish says: “What the hell is water?”

We’re all like that if we don’t actively work against it by unlearning and relearning about the ever changing conditions of our environment.