“The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

The anthropomorphic fish parable serves as the germ of Wallace’s thesis in “This Is Water.” After making this point, he goes on to dissect the different concrete and abstract realities people struggle to discuss. This argument is a conceptual refrain that recurs throughout the speech.

“[T]he really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.”

Wallace introduces the importance of awareness and contextual thought processing. Metacognition, thinking about thinking, creates distance from one’s “default mode.” Wallace emphasizes the importance of critical perception over the accumulation of knowledge. He admits that over-intellectualization can become a burden, that it can cause a negative feedback loop that imprisons the mind.

“[N]owhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired.”

Although tolerance and diversity are the status quo, Wallace argues that questioning one another’s fundamental values leads to growth. He uses the religious man versus the atheist parable to exemplify two diametrically opposed beliefs that are wrong in the same way. Treating fundamental values as deterministic leaves no room for change; therefore, people must investigate themselves and each other.