Wallace described the human default setting — automatic, unconscious self-centeredness — with the unflinching honesty that characterized his fiction. He acknowledged that 'we rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive,' but insisted it was universal: 'There is no experience you have had that you are not at the absolute center of.' The computer metaphor of 'default setting' was deliberate and precise. A default setting isn't a character flaw — it's the factory configuration. It's what happens when you don't actively choose something different. Wallace wasn't asking people to feel guilty about self-centeredness; he was asking them to notice it, the way you might notice that your computer shipped with certain preferences you can change. This passage set up the speech's ultimate argument: that the real value of education is the ability to adjust this default setting, to choose — in the tedious, frustrating moments of daily adult life — to consider that the SUV cutting you off in traffic might be driven by someone in a genuine emergency, that the woman screaming at her child in the checkout line might have been up for three nights in the hospital. 'This is not a matter of virtue,' Wallace insisted. 'It's a matter of choosing to do the work.'